The Martian Girl: A London Mystery

by Andrew Martin

'Ingeniously constructed . . . Andrew Martin's wry, amused tone is a constant joy . . . An altogether superior performance, The Martian Girl is a violent, funny, deadly serious entertainment' Irish Times


London, present day.

Jean, a failing journalist in her late thirties, finds herself entertaining a married man - a handsome, arrogant ex-barrister, universally known by his Coates. Unsure of the relationship and wanting to develop her career, she begins to write a one-woman show about a mind-reader she comes across in her research - a woman who performed in the 19th Century under the name The Martian Girl, before disappearing without a trace.

*

London, 1898.

Kate French, a striking young woman with a love for the stage, is honing her craft in the music halls of East London at the turn of the century. As the Martian Girl, she performs each night with her mind-reading partner, the cynical and money-grubbing Joseph Draper.

As Jean makes progress on her show, Kate - long since dead - begins to consume her thoughts. Jean starts to suspect that Draper fully believed in Kate's ability to read minds and that he found the idea deeply disturbing. What really happened between the two of them all those years ago? And why does Jean feel such an intense bond with The Martian Girl? As the line between Jean and Kate begins to blur, the fates of the two women are destined to transcend time, and finally to intersect.

Brilliantly conceived, The Martian Girl is a dazzling thriller that will get inside your mind.

Genres: Fiction, Crime, Historical Fiction

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Andrew Martin (born 6 July 1962) is an English novelist and journalist.

Martin was brought up in Yorkshire, studied at the University of Oxford and qualified as a barrister. He has since worked as a freelance journalist for a number of publications while writing novels, starting with Bilton, a comic novel about journalists, and The Bobby Dazzlers, a comic novel set in the North of England, for which he was named Spectator Young Writer of the Year. His series of detective novels about Jim Stringer, a railwayman reassigned to the North Eastern Railway Police in Edwardian England, includes The Necropolis Railway, The Blackpool Highflyer, The Lost Luggage Porter, Murder at Deviation Junction and Death on a Branch Line. He has also written the non-fiction book; How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man's Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts.

Reviews

[Wreade1872 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm... hmmm.. hmm... No. No 4th star for this one, its close but no.

Considering how many problems i have with this book it shows that its still pretty well written in general terms. Otherwise it would have been a lot easier to decide my score.
Firstly i read a lot of older books and thought from the advertising this was going to be set in victorian london, which it mostly isn’t. We spend maybe 20% of the book there and even then the author isn’t great at painting the setting.

Also there isn’t really a main character, and the one we spend the most time with is definitely not the one we want to spend the most time with. Then there’s the fact one of the characters hears voices and its just an oddly clunky description of crazy, i’m not a fan even if the author tries to excuse themselves later in the book by claiming a lot of research went into that.

The whole thing also feels very jerky, for want of a better descriptor, its periods of slowness then sudden events, nothing flowed for me.

I also wouldn’t call this a Mystery, i’d call it a thriller but its not exciting enough for that term, suspense maybe? Yeah i think suspense would be the best categorization.

The final sections are pretty good as it almost comes together however the author then tries to add an extra couple of layers to the whole thing.
Now if those extra layers had worked narratively speaking, i’d have been impressed. I like experimental writing and books which take chances.. however they just don’t feel earned. You can’t just try a flourish like that at the end without more buildup than we get here.

Sidenote, i’d like to talk about the errors. There are at least four times i noticed in this book name errors.. now given the plot as a whole these might be one purpose? But i don’t think so.
It is quite strange though, books often have misprints but its unusual that all the ones here are name related. So during one conversation the name Jean is switched to Camilla for two sentences, another time two other names are transposed for a sentence, and at another point a name is just sort of shoved into a sentence garbling it. Again technically possible its on purpose.

A messy uneven plot which occasionally tries and fails to be clever and is only compelling for short stretches although quite readable throughout.

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure I have ever read a book that goes so badly off the rails ... in the final 10 pages.

I was really enjoying this. Interesting interweaving of the stories in the two time-lines: Kate French, the "Martian Girl," one half of a late 1890s music hall mind-reading act, which starts off dodgy, and then becomes ever dodgier as we (and Kate) learn more about her partner Draper, and what might have happened to his previous partner. And modern day Jean Beckett, who is simultaneously conducting an affair with Coates, a very dodgy married man, and researching the Martian Girl (for a one-woman stage show. Or a novel. Or a stage show and a novel. Jean's ambitions are a flighty and poorly judged as her life choices ...)

The nasty characters are satisfyingly nasty. The nice characters (and here, let me give a shout-out to Kate French herself, and -- in the modern story stream -- Anderson, the part-time private detective-cum-sheep farmer. And his three-legged dog) are true-hearted and spunky, and put up with a lot of grief from the nasty characters. You learn a lot about late Victorian music halls acts, and their promotion. Jean is an idiot, but her dangerous denial about the crazy Coates feels real, and her journey to solve the mystery of Kate's fate feels satisfying.

But then ... oh then. That, in its own way is a spoiler, I'm afraid, and it's hard to see how I can say why the ending is so disappointing without indulging in nitty-gritty, chapter and verse spoilers. It felt arbitrary. It felt like the author thought he was doing something very clever, that pulled it all together, and IMHO, it did not.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fabulous! This is a very easy to read, enjoyable crime novel, which belies the actual complexity of the plot. There is a LOT going on in this story.
Structurally it is like looking into a mirror - a novel within a novel, within a novel. The parallels between the past and present events are constructed subtly. Although the correlation was obvious enough not to be missed, they weren’t advertised in neon lights. I like this. I enjoy having something deep into my consciousness without it rudely announcing its arrival.
The array of characters are definitively drawn, particularly Coates, the misogynistic egoist with the psychotic tendencies. Through him we are led into the seedier side of red light districts, sexual fetishes and ultimately, murder. However, what potentially could become too dark and gritty, is rescued by the dry, sardonic tone of many of these scenes.
There was something very refreshing, almost unique, about the style of this novel. Most modern crime fiction is steeped in the harsh reality of the abject present. Although Martin does not shy away from this, he contrived to combine this with a very gratifying, smooth storytelling style. It reminded me a little of a 1930s crime novel; the more genteel face of murder. And for me, that’s as good as a crime novel can get.

[Sammie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am seasoned reader and English graduate, but I can honestly say I am not sure what I’ve just read.

The book was slow to start and momentum didn’t really build. The author attempted to create a dual-narrative and this wasn’t really achieved.

I thought I was almost following the story but the parallels being drawn between Jean/Kate, Coates/Draper just didn’t enthral me like they should ..

Then, at the end. Just as the book begins to conclude we’re given an epilogue and an unnecessary 11 pages where the whole story seems to go awry and the author seems to have forgotten the whole purpose of the book and the story?

I had high hopes for this book, being the niche sort of genre I enjoy! But overall, this was terribly disappointing and I couldn’t wait for it to conclude.

[Kirsti Ryall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now, I am going to start this off by warning that in order to discuss The Martian Girl properly I will need to talk about the ending of the book and the twist that comes in the last few pages. I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for the fact that it has a bearing on how I felt about the book up until then, how I then felt about the book, and whether or not I could lay all my niggling doubts about the novel to rest because of the twist.

However, I promise that I will give fair warning so, if you really don’t want to have any inkling about how The Martian Girl ends, you have the chance to stop reading well before you inadvertently catch a glimpse of something that means you now HAVE to read on because it’s too late, dammit, to unsee what has been written! So, I am thinking of writing SPOILER
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…for at least twenty lines (possibly more if I can still see the first line or two of spoilery stuff on my laptop screen). After that, well, if you keep reading on your own head be it! Otherwise, read down to the spoilers warning, read the book (if you like the sound of it), and then read on and see if you felt the same as I did once you finished the book.

Set in London, the novel goes back and forth between the present day and 1898 and the interconnected story-lines of present-day Jean and 19th century Kate French. The link comes from Jean’s attempts to write a monologue about Kate French, a mind-reader called The Martian Girl, that she is planning to perform at a small London theatre. Jean’s work as a freelance journalist is piecemeal and poorly paid - and becoming ever more poorly paid as the print media continues to tighten its belt in order to survive. Her project is being funded by her married lover, Coates, a barrister who it turns out has quit his chambers (for reasons that become more apparent as the book progresses), but Jean is already doubting whether or not she will ever perform her monologue. As she continues to write and research what happened to the real-life character of Kate French, and her mysterious disappearance, it becomes ever clearer to Jean and to us that what she is actually doing is writing a novel.

This is clever as it enables Andrew Martin to switch easily between the present day story and that of Kate in 1898 but without us either having to read Jean ‘speaking’ her monologue or read her explanations to others about what she is going to include in her performance. Instead, we get to read about Kate through the excerpts from Jean’s burgeoning novel and what Jean discovers from old papers and articles. It also means that Martin can concentrate on each woman’s story and the building tension as it becomes clear that they are both in danger.

In 1898, Kate French, a stage performer, applies to work as the assistant of one Joseph Draper some years after his previous partner has left for Australia. From the outset, Draper appears odd and even threatening, but Kate needs regular, paid work so that she can care for her retired police officer father. Draper decides, reluctantly, to take her on and train her up in the complicated method used by stage mind readers to persuade their audiences that they are truly psychic. Martin’s impeccably researched descriptions of how different words and numbers, and the order in which they are used, denote different objects is fascinating. I came away from the book with a deep respect for the real performers back in their 19th century heyday.

Things become more mysterious when on a few occasions Kate intuits what Draper is holding before he has the chance to use their complex code to tell her. On the last occasion her description of what she sees puts her in danger leading to her disappearance - an event that is still a mystery at the time Jean begins to write about her.

In the present day, Jean is in very real danger from Coates, a violent man who has continuous conversations in his mind with a voice he believes to be his Head of Chambers. A voice which is egging him on to commit ever greater acts of violence. As the book continues we get to see Coates unravelling before our eyes while, at the same time, seeing the world as it looks and behaves according to Coates himself. We see his treatment of women (Jean, his wife, Camilla, acquaintances, sex workers) from his perspective and from those of Jean; Camilla; a private detective (and part-time shepherd!) who Camilla has employed to discover whom Coates is having an affair with; and to a lesser extent former work colleagues. Jean in particular, however, has very little inkling of Coates’ real character. Nor that his increasing paranoia has led him to believe that her novel is a thinly-veiled description of what he has done, and that Kate’s apparently genuine psychic skills in her novel are Jean’s way of attempting to blackmail him.

Martin does an excellent job of ratcheting up the suspense and fear in both settings. The increasing danger in which both Kate and Jean find themselves is cleverly done and in both cases it is added to by the two women’s lack of understanding of how their innocent actions are taken by two dangerous men.

Some other reviewers have said that they prefer the story of Kate French to that of Jean, with a few saying that they would have been happier if the entire novel had been about Kate French without the conceit of her being a character in a novel within a novel. Now, some of that might be down to their being fans of Martin’s series of Jim Stringer historical crime novels that are set in the early 20th century Edwardian England. I have to confess that I hadn’t heard of them before looking up what else Martin had written other than The Martian Girl. I am now tempted to try his Stringer series based purely on how well he captures late Victorian London.

That being said, I also thought the present day story was well written. The disorienting sensation of seeing the world through the eyes of a dangerous, deranged man was at times genuinely frightening. And I am someone who will quite cheerfully read gory crime novels late at night, while possibly eating cheese, and then fall asleep without any fear of nightmares. Now, having to fend off a cheese-mad cat on the other hand…

The final twist was an exceedingly clever one. I didn’t see it coming (and not just because I am doing my best to wean myself off the habit of reading the last few pages of a book so that if I die unexpectedly I will at least know what happens). It was a genuine surprise, but not because there was nothing to connect it with the preceding 322 pages - whenever I read that sort of ‘surprise’ ending I feel furious, and am, apparently, very grumpy for the rest of the day. A quite understandable reaction to my mind. That sort of ending just smacks of poor writing and, ultimately, a lack of belief and interest on the part of the author in their own characters.

But, but…

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Pretty certain that’s at least twenty, but just to be certain…

…SPOILER
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RIght, if you are still reading now then you have been warned! I am going to be discussing that ingenious twist. Sorry, but I have to in order to explain why I had a bit of a problem with this novel right up until I read those final three pages.

The twist is that this book is a novel within a novel within a novel. Jean, the supposed author of a potential novel about Kate French and her mysterious disappearance at the end of the 19th Century, is herself a construct created by Sally Wilkinson, a writer on the magazine edited by a woman called Camilla. It turns out that this Camilla is, ‘the model for the Camilla of her novel…[but as] far as Sally knew, the real Camilla’s husband was not going off the rails, and it would be a great surprise if he did, because he had an MBE.’ (That final remark did make me gurgle with laughter when I read it, as I believe Martin meant to happen.)

To further confuse things, as the ‘real’ Sally admits, she has also used her own name, along with the names of other work colleagues, and, in an earlier part of the novel, pretty much described word for word an actual magazine features meeting she attended. As she points out, as well as changing Camilla’s name and the names of her work colleagues, ‘She would have to begin by changing her own name, since it was bad manners to put yourself into your own fiction without at least pretending you were not doing so.’ Boom! Take that Paul Auster.

Suddenly, the reader has to go back over the whole novel and look at it from this new perspective. On top of the disorienting sensation of seeing the world through Coates’ eyes, interspersed, with seeing either the same events or Coates himself through the eyes of other (more normal) people, there is now the knowledge that as well as Jean’s novel, the whole of The Martian Girl is meant to be a first attempt at a whole novel by Sally Wilkinson. Not only are Jean, Coates, Kate, and Draper et al all characters created by Sally rather than by Andrew Martin, as it were; now, we learn, the characters of Camilla, Sally, and the other participants of the magazine’s features meeting are actually ‘real’ people who Sally has used in her novel without even changing their names. (Come on, keep up, it’s all a bit of a wibbly-wobbly, Scooby Doo, mind-fuck but it does make sense, once you get your head round it all.)

It is a brilliant twist. Yes, people have done it before, but Martin pulls it off so well that it is a genuine surprise (unless you chose to ignore my spoilers warning and kept reading). The trouble is,or at least it was for me, how well Martin captures the mistakes of many first-time authors: sudden long pieces of information that the writer couldn’t bear to cut because they spent sooo long researching all this stuff; quirky characters who came to the aspiring novelist in a flash and they don’t yet have the experience to see it was a quirk too far (part-time PI, part-time shepherd, anyone?*); the odd sentence describing someone’s thoughts using words that probably no person, in the midst of a huge emotional upheaval, would use in real life (well, except that linguistic god Stephen Fry, possibly); the sometimes flatness of emotion and lacking of one iota of self-preservation (at one stage Jean muses that Coates’ air of menace is down to his ‘maleness’ because, to date, he hasn’t killed her despite them spending quite a lot of time alone in the half-empty block of flats where she lives.); the overall sensation that within the confines of the plot the love triangle between Coates, Jean and Camilla reads as a pastiche; the fact that Jean barely talks to another woman, let alone has any apparent relationship with female friends or family.

And, here’s the problem I have. Martin’s twist is so well done, and his book is such a clever recreation of an author’s first novel (or at least first draft of a first novel) that there were moments as I was reading it when I became annoyed, a little bored, and even a couple of times contemplated giving up and not finishing it. The only thing that stopped me was the fact normal life had been upended by the Corona virus, I was self-isolating for a good long while, and was trying to eke out my books as much as possible. And, if I had given up I wouldn’t have discovered what a genius book Andrew Martin had written.

So, there we have it, a very clever novel that might have been too successful in its recreation of a new author’s errors and fixations for some of its readers to get all the way to the end. I hope that those readers are few in number, and that, at some stage, they happen to mention to someone else that they tried to read The Martian Girl and stopped partway, only for that other person to convince them that they need to go back and read the whole book (without turning to the end to read the twist first) because the pay-off will be well worth their so-doing.


*Hey, in a long-abandoned attempt at a crime novel I once had a flatulent bar-owning detective with a bizarre attachment to notelets. Eventually, I saw the light, but I did hang on to both the character and the plot for far longer than I should have done. Then, last year I began reading Mick Herron’s Slough House series, with the amazing Jackson Lamb, and saw how a great writer can create a hard-drinking, flatulent investigative genius that also seems real. Sir, I salute you.

[Joanne Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 or 4 stars? A story within a story within ... Turn of the Century music hall 'turner' Kate French is researched by a twenty-first century journalist Jean, although details on the archives and searching are a bit scant. Meanwhile Jean is trying to deal with an increasingly weird boyfriend (married to someone else) who we see is clearly a psychopath or paranoid schizophrenic, but Jean doesn't. The stories slowly converge.

I do like time slip or parallel stories but there were times this one fell a bit short. I much preferred the nineteenth century sections to the twenty-first but they were short, missing story development, and there was more emphasis on describing streets and journeys than allowing the characters' stories some space.

[Jan Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An onion. A novel within a novel. Many layers that merge to make a whole. A very intense, well-crafted plot, in which the intricacies and variances of London itself are writ large. A postulation of performance; be it on stage, or as an act of life. There’s a darkness within it, as the entwined lives of the two time-separated casts unravel.

He’s a bloody good writer, Mr Martin. This one fair rattled along, rocketing through the surrounding substrate like some demented tube train. Different to his Jim Stringer novels, but his craft (and humour) are well to the fore. Loved it. There’s one word - a name - out of place in a sentence. That threw me. Naughty editor/proof reader.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a great fan of Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series of historical crime novels with a railways setting, but The Martian Girl was something different. A complex metafictional story of mayhem, madness and murder set in contemporary and late Victorian London, it has much to offer, both in the traditional bloody thrills and spills of crime fiction but also in a vivid recreation of the world of the late nineteenth century music halls, and particularly the popular ‘mentalist’ or mind reading acts of the period. Occasionally over reliant on coincidences, The Martian Girl is nevertheless frequently gripping and always entertaining.

[Lisa Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the idea of this book, it's written well and was a solid 4 star read until the ending, which, as other reviewers have mentioned, is awful. It's trying to be far too clever and meta, and just ended up being a huge disappointment.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well not quite four stars. Seemed very uneven but it gripped me and I really did enjoy it. Lots of details about buses and trains, in London and elsewhere which I loved. Oh how I miss Jim Stringer and the railway books - I even wrote to the author to ask him for another one but he says he needs paying and I can't afford it. There were some errors in the text which I thought were sloppy proof-reading but another reviewer has suggested it could be deliberate as they mostly feature names being transposed or obviously wrong and the epilogue was a bit abrupt and awkward, but does kind of explain that....
And a great variety of characters. Loved Anderson and his 3-legged dog and Kate herself - but they were all pretty good.

[Peter Baran · Rating 3 out of 5]

I blow hot and cold on London based novels, and this illustrated the highs and low for me. A dual tale (triple if you include an overly complex third framing device in the last three pages), with a mind-reading music hall turn mixed up with murder, being written by a modern day journalist mixed up with similar murderous circumstances. Like most dual narratives one is better and more interesting than the other - that set in 1894 is much more interesting than the sub Martin Amis thuggish lawyer half of the book. The modern half almost made me ditch the book it felt so off, but I am glad I stuck with it as when the Victorian story gets going it works pretty well. So not perfect but better than I felt at the beginning.

[Donald Handley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read the last three pages twice to understand what was going on. It was a good final twist but really has no bearing on the rest of the book. There are two story lines running through the book and the music hall one was the stronger of the two although it could not have survived alone.

A good if not brilliant book, certainly not the worst I have come across. The characters were strong enough for the most part although the private eye/ shepherd and three legged dog could have been better portrayed.

A readable book, apparently well researched and deserves a read through.

[Orláith · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Martian Girl by Andrew Martin was such a disappointment to me. I loved the synopsis, and don't get me started on how beautiful the hardback is, but I just couldn't get into the story at all.

It's broken up into three parts rather than chapters, and each part has multiple POVs. Other than for one character, Coates, I didn't feel engaged in their lives. I just didn't care about them. Like I said, I'm so very disappointed.

The Martian Girl was very kindly gifted to me by the publisher.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jean is having an affair with a married man and writing a one-woman show about The Martian Girl, a music hall mesmerist. In 1898 Kate teams up with Joseph Draper to perform a music hall act as mind readers. The lives of the two women around a century apart start to mirror each other. This was a novel about women involved with dangerous men. I think I would have preferred it to be more about Kate in the late 19th century but it was still an enjoyable novel.

[Bryan D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Era, it was alright, not the worst but certainly wasn't the book I was expecting but not as boring as the last Jim Stringer book I couldn't finish, that said I do like the Stringer novels so will probably give that book another go whereas with this one, the ending would have been a bigger surprise if I'd actually cared at that point, but I sadly didn't give much of a damn at that point.

[Ipswichblade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Andrew Martin and have read nearly all his books. This was a fast paced read but as others have mentioned in reviews there is a lot going on in this story and the end was a bit disappointing

[Linda Jean · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had no interest in any of the characters in this book apart from the Coates, who at least seemed semi-real. The rest of the characters were two dimensional and unbelievable which made me very uninterested. God knows why I finished it!!!

[Marie Allcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story was quite good but would have preferred more on Kate than Jean. A slow read

[Louisa Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable read but it all got a bit confusing towards the end - some of the connections eluded me, some of threads got a bit tangled. Interesting subject matter though.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars.

[Jumana · Rating 2 out of 5]

... it was a mediocre read... I forced myself to not put it away.. forever...

[Eric Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be clear, this is not a book about Martians, or even girls. The central character is a woman in her late thirties, Jean Beckett, a writer who lives in today's London. She is writing a one-woman play -- later it becomes a novel -- about a young woman named Kate French who lived in London a century earlier, and performed on stage as "The Martian Girl". There are clear parallels in the lives of the two women, particularly in the men who are central to those lives and who turn out to be (no spoilers here) real jerks. This is a brilliant novel, with well-drawn characters, and an acute knowledge of London now and as it was at the end of the 19th century. It's about writing, and research, and deception, and fear and love. Andrew Martin is an accomplished writer of historical mysteries, but this is the first of his that I've read. It will not be the last.

[Sam Hanekom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is Inception-level good; a story within a story. Within it, two drastically different stories become intertwined into a shockingly similar outcome. What is most remarkable is not the double story feature, but the manner in which Martins has delivered such a complex, intricate plot with such precision and with so much sparkle. The Martian Girl is a polished gem of a story. Martin’s handling of two different voices from two different eras is superb and inspiring. In addition, the possibility of the supernatural in Kate’s story gives a refreshing appeal, where the line between the two narratives, and similarly between reality and fiction, is blurred and brilliant.

Full review at http://girlreviewsbook.blogspot.com/2...

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful murder mystery story within a story. I had to read the end twice to solidify in my mind what had just happened. The weaving of the stories of Kate and Jean and the villainous men they encounter is beautifully crafted and sufficiently interesting to hold your attention to the end. The only reason it doesn't get five stars is because I don't feel that I will be thrusting it into everybody's hand, exclaiming that they MUST read it immediately. I will definitely be looking for more Andrew Martin stories though.

[Frank Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with other reviewers. I'm in two or maybe three minds about this book. It turns out to have a large dose of Meta Fiction - and I think that maybe because this book is possibly an amalgam of a few different ideas thrown together and that was the best way to deal with the merging. It's good in bits and you want to learn more about Jean (but not Coates). Overall a bit disappointing.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyable, often LOL funny, a satisfying, clever novel. As with other Andrew Martin novels I've read, you need to keep your wits about you. There are plot twists and stories within stories.

A good book to settle down with on a winter's evening.

[Evangeline ✨ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness!!! What a book so glad I picked this up in the library. I was intrigued by the title more than anything but so glad I read it.

[Madeline Rands · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, interesting enough plot, just didn't really 'grip' me.
There are things I would change, but overall I did enjoy it- just wished it had maybe more 'oomph' to it.