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A review by bwlane
Armadale by Wilkie Collins
2.0
Ugh, this fucking book. While there were some really fun aspects -- the mystery that begins the first ~1/3rd of the book is super compelling -- the thing falls apart and never gets its shit together.
After the introduction of the initial mystery in the prologue and then the characters who show up in the first part, I was expecting a cool mystery with some thrills, spills and chills. What I got was a dumbfuck main character who is too stupid to be alive; a scared, paranoid asshole who has absolutely no interesting qualities; and a villain who is only villainous if you have absolutely no empathy in your brain.
At one point, a character checks on a governess's reference and this dramatic bombshell causes him to become a pariah, and to lose his best friend. What the everloving hell. I can see the loss of reputation as being a really important stake for a character to fret over, and something that could introduce drama into a story, but this character has just fallen ass-backwards into a huge sum of money and property by doing absolutely nothing. Because he gained everything through no effort of his own, losing everything by behaving the exact same way is not compelling either.
Additionally, the friend whom he loses just becomes friends with him later for, uh, reasons, I guess?
People fall in love with others in the story like five times, based on about one, one-and-a-half meetings. Ugh. All the promise of the first section was flushed into a drawing room, superstitious nonsense parade.
Additionally, I read this on the Kindle because Amazon said it was 400 pages, and I was down for a book of that length. When this monstrosity turned out to be 700+ pages, I was already in too deep to give up. Very frustrating.
After the introduction of the initial mystery in the prologue and then the characters who show up in the first part, I was expecting a cool mystery with some thrills, spills and chills. What I got was a dumbfuck main character who is too stupid to be alive; a scared, paranoid asshole who has absolutely no interesting qualities; and a villain who is only villainous if you have absolutely no empathy in your brain.
At one point, a character checks on a governess's reference and this dramatic bombshell causes him to become a pariah, and to lose his best friend. What the everloving hell. I can see the loss of reputation as being a really important stake for a character to fret over, and something that could introduce drama into a story, but this character has just fallen ass-backwards into a huge sum of money and property by doing absolutely nothing. Because he gained everything through no effort of his own, losing everything by behaving the exact same way is not compelling either.
Additionally, the friend whom he loses just becomes friends with him later for, uh, reasons, I guess?
People fall in love with others in the story like five times, based on about one, one-and-a-half meetings. Ugh. All the promise of the first section was flushed into a drawing room, superstitious nonsense parade.
Additionally, I read this on the Kindle because Amazon said it was 400 pages, and I was down for a book of that length. When this monstrosity turned out to be 700+ pages, I was already in too deep to give up. Very frustrating.