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3.65 AVERAGE
3.65 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
What a gorgeous cover!
Great concept, not the best execution. The main characters were all annoying and mostly unlikable.
“I didn’t want to die. Particularly not in a foreign country with a nearly naked Huck.”
The ending was anticlimactic. The “plot twist” could be seen a mile away.
Favorite character: maybe Lupu? I don’t know if I really have one because none of the characters stood out that much.
“Or maybe [Vlad Dracula was] a national hero AND a monster. No one is wholly good or bad, are they?”
This book is neither wholly good nor bad as well. While it wasn’t my cup of tea, maybe someone will enjoy it.
Great concept, not the best execution. The main characters were all annoying and mostly unlikable.
“I didn’t want to die. Particularly not in a foreign country with a nearly naked Huck.”
The ending was anticlimactic. The “plot twist” could be seen a mile away.
Favorite character: maybe Lupu? I don’t know if I really have one because none of the characters stood out that much.
“Or maybe [Vlad Dracula was] a national hero AND a monster. No one is wholly good or bad, are they?”
This book is neither wholly good nor bad as well. While it wasn’t my cup of tea, maybe someone will enjoy it.
Did not finish at 60%. They stole a plane. There was really nowhere for this book to go after resorting to that.
There was a lot of promise to this, I love a good adventure story with lots of history. But this just fell flat in every way for me.
My biggest pet peeve was the time period. This book is set in 1937. Great. Lots to work with in Eastern Europe in 1937. Unfortunately there is no acknowledgement of any historic context beyond the Orient Express. The way this story is told it could easily be set anywhere from 1920 to 1980 and the characters themselves behave more like they live in 2020.
The plot excited me at first but failed to hold my interest. It felt like they would get somewhere on their quest, have a set back, find a miraculous clue, move on to the next place and repeat. Also, characters do NOT need to have cute little nicknames for each other. 9 times out of 10 it is really annoying. YA authors, please just stop.
So all and all, did not care for this. It felt like a not as good version of The Historian. But that is one of my favorite books so maybe I’m just bitter.
There was a lot of promise to this, I love a good adventure story with lots of history. But this just fell flat in every way for me.
My biggest pet peeve was the time period. This book is set in 1937. Great. Lots to work with in Eastern Europe in 1937. Unfortunately there is no acknowledgement of any historic context beyond the Orient Express. The way this story is told it could easily be set anywhere from 1920 to 1980 and the characters themselves behave more like they live in 2020.
The plot excited me at first but failed to hold my interest. It felt like they would get somewhere on their quest, have a set back, find a miraculous clue, move on to the next place and repeat. Also, characters do NOT need to have cute little nicknames for each other. 9 times out of 10 it is really annoying. YA authors, please just stop.
So all and all, did not care for this. It felt like a not as good version of The Historian. But that is one of my favorite books so maybe I’m just bitter.
I was so excited when I saw that Jenn Bennett was coming out with an awesome historical fiction/fantasy/gothic novel. I loved the characters, the humor was on point, the creepiness and the settings were awesome, and honestly I just loved everything about this book. Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!
Full review: https://picturethisliteraturecom.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/the-lady-rogue/
Full review: https://picturethisliteraturecom.wordpress.com/2019/09/20/the-lady-rogue/
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
First, it's a light read, it’s not particularly complex and it goes by really fast – and thank goodness for that because this book just wasn't my type. I stuck around until the end because I really hoped I'd enjoy it, the setting and concept were just what I was looking for, but in the end I just did not like the experience.
The plot: very slow and almost entirely passive.
It hardly seems like the characters are behind any actions of the book and are driving the plot forward, and more like things are just happening to them and they’re being swept along. Sort of gimmicky supporting characters are either easily found or just coincidentally show up to tell the protagonist, Theodora, exactly what she needs to know to move the plot along. And not just hints, either, they go on and on at length about it, with details they couldn’t have known if this character didn’t decide to just infodump whatever backstory or mythological tale on them. This is so blatant and shameless that Theodora actually acknowledges it, stating something like “he’d missed out on learning this because he was rude to this woman. Could it really have been that simple?” Yeah, if you have to nod to how simple it is in order to reassure your readers that at least it’s self-aware, maybe it’s not a very strong resolution that you should repeat several times at key moments of the book.
It was usually pretty unbelievable, too; characters with supposedly well-guarded secrets would just spill them carelessly when the protagonist came along… and why? What’s their motivation to do so? It’s sort of exasperating, especially for a character that did not seem to deserve any such high praise. There were so many efforts to make Theodora seem special, especially by circumstances of birth which are a bit uncompelling to begin with (I personally like it when my characters earn their right to be considered special), but it was so exaggerated and overall melodramatic.
On that note, the characters: difficult to like. Theodora is portrayed as smart within the narrative, which is really only demonstrated by her ability to solve crossword puzzles and decode a cipher and nothing else, but she has no understanding of the real world, especially not for someone who is supposedly well-travelled. All the attempts to make her seem smart just make her seem unlikable, like her bashfully recounting a story where she got fired for “using a bit of profanity” while disagreeing over a classification method of some manuals because the person shelving them didn’t understand Latin and thus was doing it all wrong. I recognise this as an attempt to make the reader sympathetic towards a young woman who is destined for greater things than her time period allows her to do, but many of those attempts did not work at garnering sympathy from me and just made me dislike her. This overall childish, bratty tone to everything she says combined with the fact she is nicknamed “empress” (and other nobility titles) just prevented me from rooting for her.
Her love interest, Huck, I think was supposed to have this “boyish charm”, but he also just got on my nerves. Even at the very end I really didn’t have any tangible sense of his character. He and Theodora also sounded indistinguishable at times, which is not only boring to read but makes the whole “upper-class woman disadvantaged because of her gender” can’t fully see perspective of “man who is disadvantaged socially and economically” fall apart, too.
Most of the angst around their romance was just a huge miscommunication trope, which is frustrating and weak, because of how easily it could be resolved. Granted, there’s a third person (Theodora’s father) who lied about certain circumstances in the mix, but the characters made no effort to discuss any of it until it came out during an argument.
More on the romance: pretty silly and repetitive. Theodora first encounters Huck as he is getting out of the bath after getting back to her hotel room. She immediately gets “distracted” by him being in a towel (I know, it’s the 1930s and men are not allowed to be shirtless at the beach either), but then we’re told he broke her heart by disappearing without a trace and not contacting her for a year? The inconsistency in tone is wild, and the way she spoke of her emotional turmoil just made me sigh when it was written right after she thought of was how attracted to him she was. Afterwards, they escape a break-in through the balcony, a scene that Theodora’s inner monologue completely ruins the tension of because she thinks about how her breasts press against Huck when he… helps her crawl over to another balcony and avoid falling to her death? Followed by a cheeky towel slip and a “don’t look, don’t look, don’t look… okay, I looked” moment. I don’t know if this was meant to be subversive by having a man in this position and having a woman express clear desire for him, and I believe this would have totally worked if it happened during a point of low tension/cooldown in the novel, but it ruined any and all illusion of danger by being placed here, and lost all its effect as an interesting breaking of the mold. This breaking of tone at crucial moments of the story happened several times.
This unfortunately set the tone for the romance for the rest of the book; Theodora went back and forth between being upset over her heartbreak, lusting after Huck, having residual feelings for him… we finally get to know what exactly caused their falling out around the 100 page mark, but this barely improves even once that gets cleared. They constantly bicker, but it’s not cute, it’s not charming or funny banter, it’s sometimes genuinely resentful and mean-spirited, and that’s usually not a dynamic you’d want to play with when you want your readers to believe in and root for your couple. I mean, Huck nicknamed Theodora “banshee” because of how much she was wailing at night while she was mourning the death of her mother. And he sticks to this nickname years later, even after he’s presumably matured as a person of an age (18) that you’d expect to understand why that’s not particularly quirky or cute.
It was also repetitive. Of course, these are young characters prone to getting swept up in their emotions, but I do believe 17 and 18 year olds are self-aware enough not to believe their half-baked crush wasn’t their only chance at romance in their entire lives. Like this exchange, on page 155:
“You don’t think I’ve suffered?”
“Not like I did.”
“Is that right?”
“You left me!” I cried, angry and hurt and feeling as if he’d stripped away my armor.
“And it nearly killed me!”
“Good!” I exclaimed. “Because it did kill me!”
I just find that silly and exaggerated, nothing compelling or emotional about passages written like that.
The writing: doesn't really flow and sort of plain. The teen voice was just rampant and out of control, especially for teens that are nearing adulthood and who live in 1937, a time where teen culture/lingo with all its overdramatic, sardonic phrases wasn't developed yet. The attempts at humour were misplaced, and consisted mostly of obnoxious hyperbolas, like the heroine using “I’d rather do X than do X!” phrases that consisted of very haphazard violent metaphors, like “I’d rather get my hand chewed off by rabid dogs than tell him he looks nice”, or something along those lines, which I found childish. Same goes for the little “yeesh, yikes, ugh, talk about, yeah okay maybe not…” type of attempts at sarcasm. Jarring given the time period and class of the protagonist, and unpleasant to read for me.
And other bits of internal reactions were so lukewarm they might as well have been cut out. Theodora is told her father is disposable to the main antagonist? “Disposable? That was the last thing I wanted to hear” (p.297). Yeah, understatement of the century, you don’t like hearing your father is disposable. It’s full of these lackluster, completely unemotional reactions and filler phrases.
There were also a lot of modern expressions thrown in, that completely broke the immersion, even if you agreed with what they were saying. One moment in the end has Theodora saying most witches are not bad and “Women are always demonized”. It’s entirely true, but the use of this modern sociological lingo stands out pretty badly.
Theodora’s internal monologue was also peppered with random Romanian words, some which had their place (specific foods or creatures), but others which were… completely regular words for which there is a clear, direct English equivalent. This wasn’t a deal breaker; it just sort of felt forced when the words were not nuanced or unique in any way. Otherwise, I appreciated the culture-specific terms being kept. Even if it was a little silly at times, like one character’s Carpathian wolf-dog being named Lupu, which means, you guessed it, “wolf”. They named their wolf-dog “wolf”. Okay.
Lastly, and this is a matter of personal taste, the way matters of occult were written about was not what I had hoped it would be. I was really hoping for some mystical, mysterious, almost esoteric style of writing about these things, filled with rich imagery and detailed supernatural events. This is just my personal expectations not aligning with the book, but it was disappointing nonetheless. The focus was absolutely just “adventuring” and not any higher power, which also made the magic system seem underdeveloped.
Overall, can you enjoy this book despite its flaws? Probably, it really depends on what your tolerance for certain things is. It just happened to include most of my pet peeves. I haven’t read the author’s other work, and it’s not really what I usually go for, but who knows, maybe I'll end up trying it eventually. But my take on this one is: only read if you like the style and tone of YA, and if you want a treasure hunt adventure with some magical elements, not an occult tale.
The plot: very slow and almost entirely passive.
It hardly seems like the characters are behind any actions of the book and are driving the plot forward, and more like things are just happening to them and they’re being swept along. Sort of gimmicky supporting characters are either easily found or just coincidentally show up to tell the protagonist, Theodora, exactly what she needs to know to move the plot along. And not just hints, either, they go on and on at length about it, with details they couldn’t have known if this character didn’t decide to just infodump whatever backstory or mythological tale on them. This is so blatant and shameless that Theodora actually acknowledges it, stating something like “he’d missed out on learning this because he was rude to this woman. Could it really have been that simple?” Yeah, if you have to nod to how simple it is in order to reassure your readers that at least it’s self-aware, maybe it’s not a very strong resolution that you should repeat several times at key moments of the book.
It was usually pretty unbelievable, too; characters with supposedly well-guarded secrets would just spill them carelessly when the protagonist came along… and why? What’s their motivation to do so?
Spoiler
Well, we learn at some point that the protagonist is somehow distantly related to Vlad the Impaler and this somehow gives her magical blood, and the supporting characters want her to reach her goal by virtue of this. Yeah, it’s practically a “chosen one” narrative; the protagonist is considered to be meant to find all three rings because she has “the blood of the dragon”, or something. And she makes a huge deal out of it even if the relation is paper thin.On that note, the characters: difficult to like. Theodora is portrayed as smart within the narrative, which is really only demonstrated by her ability to solve crossword puzzles and decode a cipher and nothing else, but she has no understanding of the real world, especially not for someone who is supposedly well-travelled. All the attempts to make her seem smart just make her seem unlikable, like her bashfully recounting a story where she got fired for “using a bit of profanity” while disagreeing over a classification method of some manuals because the person shelving them didn’t understand Latin and thus was doing it all wrong. I recognise this as an attempt to make the reader sympathetic towards a young woman who is destined for greater things than her time period allows her to do, but many of those attempts did not work at garnering sympathy from me and just made me dislike her. This overall childish, bratty tone to everything she says combined with the fact she is nicknamed “empress” (and other nobility titles) just prevented me from rooting for her.
Her love interest, Huck, I think was supposed to have this “boyish charm”, but he also just got on my nerves. Even at the very end I really didn’t have any tangible sense of his character. He and Theodora also sounded indistinguishable at times, which is not only boring to read but makes the whole “upper-class woman disadvantaged because of her gender” can’t fully see perspective of “man who is disadvantaged socially and economically” fall apart, too.
Most of the angst around their romance was just a huge miscommunication trope, which is frustrating and weak, because of how easily it could be resolved. Granted, there’s a third person (Theodora’s father) who lied about certain circumstances in the mix, but the characters made no effort to discuss any of it until it came out during an argument.
More on the romance: pretty silly and repetitive. Theodora first encounters Huck as he is getting out of the bath after getting back to her hotel room. She immediately gets “distracted” by him being in a towel (I know, it’s the 1930s and men are not allowed to be shirtless at the beach either), but then we’re told he broke her heart by disappearing without a trace and not contacting her for a year? The inconsistency in tone is wild, and the way she spoke of her emotional turmoil just made me sigh when it was written right after she thought of was how attracted to him she was. Afterwards, they escape a break-in through the balcony, a scene that Theodora’s inner monologue completely ruins the tension of because she thinks about how her breasts press against Huck when he… helps her crawl over to another balcony and avoid falling to her death? Followed by a cheeky towel slip and a “don’t look, don’t look, don’t look… okay, I looked” moment. I don’t know if this was meant to be subversive by having a man in this position and having a woman express clear desire for him, and I believe this would have totally worked if it happened during a point of low tension/cooldown in the novel, but it ruined any and all illusion of danger by being placed here, and lost all its effect as an interesting breaking of the mold. This breaking of tone at crucial moments of the story happened several times.
This unfortunately set the tone for the romance for the rest of the book; Theodora went back and forth between being upset over her heartbreak, lusting after Huck, having residual feelings for him… we finally get to know what exactly caused their falling out around the 100 page mark, but this barely improves even once that gets cleared. They constantly bicker, but it’s not cute, it’s not charming or funny banter, it’s sometimes genuinely resentful and mean-spirited, and that’s usually not a dynamic you’d want to play with when you want your readers to believe in and root for your couple. I mean, Huck nicknamed Theodora “banshee” because of how much she was wailing at night while she was mourning the death of her mother. And he sticks to this nickname years later, even after he’s presumably matured as a person of an age (18) that you’d expect to understand why that’s not particularly quirky or cute.
It was also repetitive. Of course, these are young characters prone to getting swept up in their emotions, but I do believe 17 and 18 year olds are self-aware enough not to believe their half-baked crush wasn’t their only chance at romance in their entire lives. Like this exchange, on page 155:
Spoiler
“You don’t think I’ve suffered?”
“Not like I did.”
“Is that right?”
“You left me!” I cried, angry and hurt and feeling as if he’d stripped away my armor.
“And it nearly killed me!”
“Good!” I exclaimed. “Because it did kill me!”
I just find that silly and exaggerated, nothing compelling or emotional about passages written like that.
The writing: doesn't really flow and sort of plain. The teen voice was just rampant and out of control, especially for teens that are nearing adulthood and who live in 1937, a time where teen culture/lingo with all its overdramatic, sardonic phrases wasn't developed yet. The attempts at humour were misplaced, and consisted mostly of obnoxious hyperbolas, like the heroine using “I’d rather do X than do X!” phrases that consisted of very haphazard violent metaphors, like “I’d rather get my hand chewed off by rabid dogs than tell him he looks nice”, or something along those lines, which I found childish. Same goes for the little “yeesh, yikes, ugh, talk about, yeah okay maybe not…” type of attempts at sarcasm. Jarring given the time period and class of the protagonist, and unpleasant to read for me.
And other bits of internal reactions were so lukewarm they might as well have been cut out. Theodora is told her father is disposable to the main antagonist? “Disposable? That was the last thing I wanted to hear” (p.297). Yeah, understatement of the century, you don’t like hearing your father is disposable. It’s full of these lackluster, completely unemotional reactions and filler phrases.
There were also a lot of modern expressions thrown in, that completely broke the immersion, even if you agreed with what they were saying. One moment in the end has Theodora saying most witches are not bad and “Women are always demonized”. It’s entirely true, but the use of this modern sociological lingo stands out pretty badly.
Theodora’s internal monologue was also peppered with random Romanian words, some which had their place (specific foods or creatures), but others which were… completely regular words for which there is a clear, direct English equivalent. This wasn’t a deal breaker; it just sort of felt forced when the words were not nuanced or unique in any way. Otherwise, I appreciated the culture-specific terms being kept. Even if it was a little silly at times, like one character’s Carpathian wolf-dog being named Lupu, which means, you guessed it, “wolf”. They named their wolf-dog “wolf”. Okay.
Lastly, and this is a matter of personal taste, the way matters of occult were written about was not what I had hoped it would be. I was really hoping for some mystical, mysterious, almost esoteric style of writing about these things, filled with rich imagery and detailed supernatural events.
Spoiler
There is magic in the book, but it is barely touched upon.Overall, can you enjoy this book despite its flaws? Probably, it really depends on what your tolerance for certain things is. It just happened to include most of my pet peeves. I haven’t read the author’s other work, and it’s not really what I usually go for, but who knows, maybe I'll end up trying it eventually. But my take on this one is: only read if you like the style and tone of YA, and if you want a treasure hunt adventure with some magical elements, not an occult tale.
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No