caresays 's review for:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

2.0

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I……did not like this. It’ll definitely be someone else’s cup of tea, but there was so much about it that ultimately wasn’t for me. I would have probably loved it when I was younger. I think some of the writing was rather nice and the author did a good job conveying a sense of atmosphere and place, but overall the plot, characters, and pacing were at the best the times fine and the worst of times boring.

Spoiler

Felicity was a very dull protagonist, and the book suffers for us having to be with her the entire time. (I also abhor the use of present tense for books, and I found it very difficult to get past that.) Ellis is a little manic pixie, but in a way where it’s like…..mysterious and literary. But also boring?? She’s so predictable? And so are all the plot twists — they’re seen from a mile away. The pacing was so slow that at one point in the middle I realized I was just bored out of my mind. The book picks up towards the end, but there’s a good chunk of it that’s just shoved full of ghost lore and nothing happens. I also felt like this simultaneously was so much about the Dalloway Five but also not about them at all. Like, there was both too much written about them but also too little. The book followed the same repeating pattern of Felicity hallucinating but not, Ellis manipulating her but not, o no ghosts but not, and it grew tedious. Again, I did not have the patience for this, but maybe I wouldn’t for the Secret History either if I read it for the first time now! But for my personal experience reading this, it was very meh.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this book is also pretentious as fuck, and there are whole conversations that are just there to show how clever the author is as they're referencing figures and books and theories that 95% of readers are unfamiliar with. These conversations have nothing to do with the story or the characters, and they are so dull.