val’s Reviews > Far from the Madding Crowd > Status Update

bathsheba just lowkey bodied a hall full of men by being like "ok just because i'm a woman and just because i only got this job by accidentally breaking the glass ceiling due to a thieving bailiff i will NOT tolerate disrespect" and everyone just nodded along. i love women in male fields.

sometimes a book is so painfully obviously written by a man...

this is good, and the premise is interesting, but the pacing is so terribly off, and bathsheba doesn't feel like a character yet. maybe the last point has something to do with the fact that we're seeing everything from gabriel's perspective at the moment, but bathsheba feels underdeveloped and stagnant despite her supposed ascendancy to wealth.

a proposal and a rejection within 30 pages. whatever happened to slow burn, gabriel oak?

"manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly by the woman" is such a wonderful line. what the situation calls for does not often align with what is expected of you.

you know the pen on fire gif. or the gif of penelope featherington serving face while she's writing a whistledown article. well, that's how i felt annotating "vanity" next to "woman's prescriptive infirmity" only to have my annotation affirmed at the end of the first chapter #womeninpropheticfields