kitnotmarlowe 's review for:

The Formidable Miss Cassidy by Meihan Boey

2.0

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Listen. It's been several months since I read The Formidable Miss Cassidy. It is no longer on my Kindle. I am only reviewing it now because I put it on my worst of 2024 list and need to explain my reasoning. 

The biggest problem with this novel is structural. If we can even call it a novel instead of three novellas in a trenchcoat. Maybe even two novellas and one short story. The Formidable Miss Cassidy is divided into three parts that feel disconnected despite sharing characters, a setting, and an overarching plot. The two main parts bump up against each other, more like two distinct stories than halves of a larger narrative, and the third is little more than a drawn-out epilogue. Had Meihan Boey written a collection of interconnected short stories or a longer book, this problem would have been easily solved. Unfortunately, because the novel is under 250 pages, there isn't enough space for her to develop either of the major stories at the leisurely pace she sets for herself. There are long stretches (which could not have been more than a dozen pages or so) where very little is happening, and because Boey saves almost all of Miss Cassidy's backstory until the final quarter, the reader has very little to theorize about in these slower sections. There isn't enough to chew on to make this a worthwhile read.

The other problem I had was entirely personal. While I've been trying to get out of my comfort zone and read more historical fantasy (a genre I tend to find quite silly), The Formidable Miss Cassidy ended up a little too cozy. The characters and dialogue were too twee for my tastes, and Miss Cassidy herself is Mary Poppins if she were a whimsigoth Tumblr witch. There's definitely an audience for this sort of story, but I am not a part of it.