A review by broomgrass
Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton

2.0

At first, I welcomed the very conversational and confiding tone; it is markedly different from much of the 18th and 19th century literature I have been reading lately. The text reads like something surprisingly modern; however, the modern texts that it ended up reminding me of were of a sort similar to Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey. No sex scenes or vampires, but a lot of fantasizing and infantile frustration mixed in with a heavy-handed dash of "But what does life MEAN?" and "Agh, I'm so ugly (but really she's not) and live such a hard life (but really, it's not)" and "Let me tell YOU, wise reader, what a long, hard life I've had (she's 22)" A friend described the tone as "written by a teenager," and I think I would agree with that for the most part; a few descriptions and scenes read as genuine and sincere, but for the most part it reads like a Harlequin without the sex or a happy ending.