Status Updates From Rondo Allegro

I ready for the MC to finally see each other again.

Me, a thoughtful and insightful reviewer: "This is boring. I'm bored."

I can tell Smith doesn't want Anna to talk and think like a modern feminist, but she doesn't seem to quite know how else to write Anna's marriage to a man she barely knows. So Anna just doesn't seem to treat it like that big of an aspect of her life - I hardly know how she feels about it at all.

Smith literally just broke the fourth wall to "beg the reader's indulgence". This is aesthetic porn for fans of the pre-Victorian era.

I guess I can picture why you'd like this novel, if you're interested in books like Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre. This book doesn't really feel like either of those, but something about it just suggests a similar appeal to me. I like both of those novels, but I'm not inherently interested in that historical era, and that might be why I'm not very into this book.

There are interesting scenes here, and Smith's writing isn't bad at all. There are just too few interesting scenes to match the uninteresting ones, and the scenes don't fit together to form much of anything.

I'm just frustrated with how aimless this plot is. It's not episodic exactly - one event does lead to another - but Anna doesn't have any sort of goal. Things just sort of happen to her, and she doesn't have much of an interest in controlling how they go.

The prose and the characterization actually aren't bad, they're just not good enough to make up for such a meandering, uninteresting plot.

This feels very old-fashioned to me, like Smith was trying to write with the sensibilities of a 18th century French novel. I guess that's probably the point, but without an interesting story to back it up, it just ends up being boring. Anna isn't a bad protagonist, but she's not enough to save this book.

Hey, look, Anna's falling in love with a guy who clearly doesn't care about her, and is ignoring her friend's warning about how much of an asshole he is. I WONDER HOW THIS IS GOING TO PLAY OUT. I'M BITING MY NAILS IN SUSPENSE.

I can't tell if the problem is that I don't like historical fiction very much, or if this book is just really fucking boring.

This is a very cliched opening for an historical fiction novel. A woman's father dies, and she's forced into an arranged marriage. I barely even read historical fiction, but I feel like I've seen that a million times in historical fiction and fantasy novels. Maybe this is why I don't read the genre very much.