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gracerowland 's review for:
Mrs England
by Stacey Halls
3.5 stars
It's not this book's fault, but I read a novel with an extremely similar premise and a lot of the same tropes a month and a half ago, and that really dampened my enjoyment of both. This book is the "original" and much more popular of these two (the other being "The Secrets of Hartwood Hall"), but it just made me tired. In this novel, a young female nursemaid (in the other, a governess) in the Edwardian era (in the other, Victorian) accepts a placement at a large family manor that seems to be full of secrets, and surprise surprise, our protagonist also has a secret past. The secrets mainly revolve around a marriage, and what is revealed has to do with something that would have been discussed very little in the actual era the novel is set in. The secrets of the protagonist, at least, aren't the same, but it really annoys me when a first-person voice is keeping information from the reader for no good reason; it just feels so artificial and lazy and so clearly meant to create suspense and propel the plot, but it doesn't make sense to me as a narrative device. I guess it's my fault for choosing novels so similar to one another, but I do also think the historical fiction genre could stand to diversify their tropes a little bit. Anyway, this was fairly interesting but too long, I didn't care very much about the characters, and it was frustrating waiting for the protagonist to catch up to what we already know as the reader.
It's not this book's fault, but I read a novel with an extremely similar premise and a lot of the same tropes a month and a half ago, and that really dampened my enjoyment of both. This book is the "original" and much more popular of these two (the other being "The Secrets of Hartwood Hall"), but it just made me tired. In this novel, a young female nursemaid (in the other, a governess) in the Edwardian era (in the other, Victorian) accepts a placement at a large family manor that seems to be full of secrets, and surprise surprise, our protagonist also has a secret past. The secrets mainly revolve around a marriage, and what is revealed has to do with something that would have been discussed very little in the actual era the novel is set in. The secrets of the protagonist, at least, aren't the same, but it really annoys me when a first-person voice is keeping information from the reader for no good reason; it just feels so artificial and lazy and so clearly meant to create suspense and propel the plot, but it doesn't make sense to me as a narrative device. I guess it's my fault for choosing novels so similar to one another, but I do also think the historical fiction genre could stand to diversify their tropes a little bit. Anyway, this was fairly interesting but too long, I didn't care very much about the characters, and it was frustrating waiting for the protagonist to catch up to what we already know as the reader.