A review by octavia_cade
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

adventurous medium-paced

3.0

The thing about Moll is that she says, flat-out, that most readers will find the story of her repentance a lot less interesting than all the stories of her sinning... and she's right. The vast majority of the book is a catalogue of her bad behaviour, and I was honestly surprised at how modern her presentation was. I've never read Defoe and know vanishingly little about him, except that this book of his came out in 1722, so I wasn't expecting such a feminist approach to the main character. Yes, Moll is essentially amoral, always out for herself, but it's clear that Defoe considers her a product of exploitation and poverty as well as her own character. I think he enjoys her immensely, and that atonement at the end... it does water her down somewhat.

The thing is, even before we got to the watering down, I was getting a little bored. Immensely appealing as Moll is, her story got pretty repetitive by the end. There's only so many times she can steal or cheat or screw her way through the surrounding population until it feels a bit same-old, and I was done long before she was.

I will say that this edition has a particularly poor attempt at a glossary tucked away at the back. A glossary related to classic literature in general, not just this novel, but it's badly edited and occasionally inaccurate. Check out the entry for "words, to have" which asserts that Black Beauty was written by Emily Brontë. I think the fuck not.