luxxybee97 's review for:

Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall

3.0

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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 3 stars 

 

tl;dr – when the second last line actually said “looking for Jane” I did snort a bit 

 

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   I was originally going to give this is a half-a-star higher, but there’s a plot point towards the end of the book that – in retrospect – I probably should have seen coming, but which is so damn clichéd that I genuinely didn’t even consider the author doing it. The result, while it might make the sappy-hearted happy, robs us of a lot of the book’s latent emotional power, and it also doesn’t feel true to a character we’ve spent most of the book with. It feels like the ending readers would want, rather than the ending that’s true to the book. 

 

   Anyway, apart from that, this was a really powerful read. The prose feels pretty pedestrian and we’re certainly never stopped from knowing every thought and feeling of a character, but Evelyn, Nancy, and Angela are compelling protagonists, and I won’t let the shortfalls of their literary reality hold them back. Okay, Angela may have been the least compelling, but her inclusion was a nice framing apparatus that I think worked well – even if it led to the above-mentioned twist. Evelyn and Nancy’s parts were especially juicy, and I feel like the latter’s emotional journey is the most coherent and developed in the entire book. Nancy’s history is almost the history of a whole nation, and I appreciated an insight into a chapter of Canada’s past that I don’t think I’d ever really heard of before.