yendis_17's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
5.0
ladyeremite's review
1.0
This book could serve as a useful model for writing historical fiction in so much as it provides a simple and yet fairly all-encompassing guide to what *not* to do. It is, to put it plainly, a very bad novel on multiple levels.
I am an academic historian of French history whose fascination with the French Revolution spans over three decades. I am not, however, the kind of scholar who gets upset by occasional historical inaccuracies in fictional works or who will object if your approach to characters or narrative differs from the way I envision events, so long as you portray these in ways that make internal sense and bear some relation to historical reality. What I’m going to say about Ribbons of Scarlet involves less nitpicking factual errors with the presentation of revolutionary France than with examining the mediocrity of the novel’s historical imagination.
The best historical fiction immerses the reader in a world that is simultaneously unfamiliar and yet believable. It allows the reader to understand not just the facts that structure this foreign but human world but also the imaginaries that guide its characters’ beliefs and actions. It does so in a way that preserves the contingency and possibility of living at a moment as history is in the making – where characters talk and think *not* in the narratives that will later settle and enfold around them, but rather in the exhilarating chaos of *not knowing.* The best historical fiction takes us on a historical journey as well. Even passable historical fiction, novels that fall short of that standard of excellence, contains the following: fresh and engaging prose, characters who are unique and three-dimensional, and a vivid sense of the world in which those characters exist that conveys a vivid and visceral sensory experience for the reader.
Ribbons of Scarlet not only did none of these things, it went painfully above and beyond in failing to do these things.
This novel literally gave me a headache, but I pulled through and finished in a day because I knew that if I stopped I wouldn't muster the will to pick it up and write the scathing indictment it deserved.
Much of this novel reads like it was lifted directly from a Wikipedia article, dumping vast amounts of information on the reader at once while yet providing no deeper sense of the world the characters are navigating. It might be unavoidable in explaining an event as complex as the French Revolution to have the occasional information dump along the lines of “The Assembly began its attack on religion more than a year ago. First by placing the church’s property at the disposition of the government. Then by banning monastic vows and sentencing to death monks who failed to marry. And finally, by requiring all clergy to take an oath of loyalty to France. Most priests refused, as the oath conflicted with their duty to Rome by demanding they put nation before obedience to the pope. Such priests are labeled nonjuring, though I would call them the only true ecclesiastics in France.[173-174]” (These information dumps are particularly egregious when discussing anything related to slavery or the situation in Saint-Domingue. It's like "we don't really want to talk about this but we want to show we care about race issues"). However, similar “tell-not-show” passages happen repeatedly in Ribbons of Scarlet, leaving the novel sounding rushed and overeager. Instead of allowing the reader to experience this world, and find out the pieces of it in a way that would gradually come to make sense, we’re given the Cliff Notes version from some character’s head. Indeed, in reading this novel I thought frequently of when I assign my students French Revolution role-playing games. The goal in these games is to show you “know the information” and can articulate it through your character. If this was the purpose of an historical novel, then Ribbons of Scarlet would have succeeded, at least on this level. Sadly, it is not. The conversations between the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy are particularly unbelievable in this way. While I’m sure the author’s intention was to show that their marriage was a “meeting of minds,” no one talks so continuously in theoretical generalizations summarizing larger world views this side of an Ayn Rand sex scene.
The authors also periodically throw in random, distracting, and sometimes incorrect French, whose only apparent purpose is to “show the reader we are in France” rather than, say, convey words whose meaning has no direct English equivalent. Everyone* here would be speaking French so there’s no need to interject the perfectly translatable “calme-toi” or “incroyable” or “c’est joli celui là!” or “pots de chambre” (etc.) and there is certainly no need for the grammatically incorrect femmes sans-culottes (used as a singular noun) or the nickname Mousseline Serieuse (which should be Mousseline la Sérieuse). One sentence women are “women” and in the next they are “femmes;” “yes” or “correct” somewhere along the line become replaced by “oui” at the end of interrogative sentences. I make this remark not because I’m a French grammar Nazi, but because it exemplifies the gratuitous pretentiousness and superficial erudition of the novel more generally.
Even when the novel attempts to get beyond just recounting information to express feeling or passion, it is undermined on two fronts. First, very little attention is paid to the kind of research into the details of daily life during the Revolution – despite the numerous scholarly books on this subject – that would allow you readers to really immerse themselves in more than just the sheer narrative passage of events. What are characters eating, smelling, dreaming, buying, seeing, touching etc? Describe the visceral experience of macaron, don't just tell us it's one. And do so in a way that makes us feel that we are in a different era. Don't just superimpose our own experiences on to it. Louise Audu the fruit-seller slips into extra macarons into her sack --- seriously??? We are not 21st century marketing assistants here sneaking pastries from the company lunch into our purses. Similarly, when Manon Roland takes a random trip Caen to clear her head she seems to have taken the TGV rather than the *days* of uncomfortable travel to and from for her to just randomly appear somewhere else (and randomly bump into Charlotte Corday, since all characters in this novel are always inexplicably running into and/or thinking about other characters).
The French Revolution may have abolished the use of torture, but with the number of times that cheeks were growing hot, fear/dread/shivers were creeping up spines and “swells of emotions” were crashing over characters, I could swear these authors had reinstated it. When the language ventures into originality, it is a painful, halting venture still ridden with clichés. Take these two gleaming atrocities in Quinn’s chapter on Manon Roland: “in the dimpled salonnières like Sophie Condorcet who would fling mercy into the teeth of an entire hissing Convention” [318-319] and “in the eye of the storm, in the shadow of the guillotine, we all walked in the glint of lightning” [334]. Language is also tellingly anachronistic – such as Corday’s use of the term “propaganda” and Roland’s use of “atavistic.” The use of sometimes ridiculously heavy-handed clichés, particularly clichés that simply *tell* without accurately conveying the sensual experience of feelings, is illustrative of a larger lovelessness in the portrayal of the past. In place of a desire to understand characters and how they lived, there is a simplistic, rather stupid, political message of the present (GIRL POWER!) projected directly on to the past.
Indeed, despite the fact that these women, as historical characters, were intensely passionate people, and their era an intensely passionate one, the reader is repeatedly just told this and now allowed to work through it as s/he reads. For instance, here we have Pauline Léon: “This was the reason I was determined to give women a voice, and fight for our rights to bear arms, so that women could become equal in our new republic. This was the reason I woke every morning and started the day anew.” [343] Seriously, this is okay for your answer to some characterization prompt about what gets your character motivated. But in the actual novel you SHOW us that this is what motivates your character, you ILLUSTRATE this.
But it’s hard to show characterization when your characters aren’t really that different at all. Madame Élisabeth, Sophie de Condorcet, Pauline Léon, Louise Audu, Charlotte Corday, Manon Roland and Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe are very different women with not only very different opinions but actually different characters. But, in this telling, they are speak with more or less the same voice, with some minor variations (Audu and Léon are more ferocious, Roland and Condorcet more theoretical and Élisabeth and Corday more religious - and of course, as we’re reminded practically every 10-15 pages in case we forgot, Sainte-Amaranthe is BEAUTIFUL).
Indeed, despite the often life-and-death political differences that divide these women, their similarities lead them, at various moments in the prose, to various extremely unbelievable moments of recognition of themselves in others. At one point, the starving fruit seller Audu says of Madame Élisabeth: “Yet I knew her birth and status had trapped her in this moment. Despite her wealth and her brother and her fancy shoes, her status as princess forced her to bend to our will. The same way my poverty had forced me to bend to other wills.” [163] Likewise, Léon recognizes that Corday too is oppressed by being a woman and Elisabeth in Sophie de Condorcet. This would 100% not happen.
It’s almost as if these women are examining their counterparts through the 20-21st century sociological lens of race, class, and gender rather than the actual imaginaries of the world that illuminated actual people during this period. There is no attempt to really get us into the head of what these women believed, not in *our* feminist terms, but in their own – where discussions of women’s rights were part of discussions of family, divine right, religion, regeneration, citizenship and republicanism. When we are exposed to these characters, we need to understand that their mental constellations are *not* our own, and we need to be show how they configure the world not in our terms but in theirs.
This laziness - or deliberate and clumsy imposition of modern comfortably liberal (but NOT left) value systems onto the past - reveals itself in what we are supposed to take away from this book. In reality, the French Revolution both allowed women's voices to be heard and silenced those for being, as it is put by Sainte-Amaranthe, "too political, too intelligent, too opinionated, too daring, too pretty" (p. 497). The French Revolution killed a lot of women and the shutting down of the radical women's clubs and the misogyny that animated so much discourse against Marie Antoinette revealed a fundamental distrust of female power. BUT on the other hand, women gained during the Revolution unprecedented powers to divorce, to inherit property and to pursue the fathers of their illegitimate children for support. This is because the political imagination of the French Revolution was neither monolithic nor explicable in the terms of our own day; debates were rather guided by entirely different understandings of concepts of gender, family, and their relation to the nation-state. The authors of Ribbons of Scarlet make absolutely NO effort, despite the abundant scholarly literature - some of which they cite in their bibliography - to explore the logic that gives birth to such apparent contradictions.
This profound inability to truly recreate and empathize with these characters on their own terms and instead insert them into the narrative of White Educated Middle-Class American Women probably explains the single most bizarre deviation from the historical record in this novel – and one that is given no explanation in the end notes – the decision to portray Robespierre as a sexual assaulter.
Now, it’s hardly an original choice to villainize the Jacobins (or rather the Montagnards – the authors don’t really understand how contemporaries would have understood their political formations, as can be seen by their uses of the term “Girondins” and “Les Enragés”). And since there is basically NO mention of the dire realities of economic collapse, multiple civil wars and insurrections and a desperate struggle against *the entirety of Europe* that make the Terror, at least initially, explicable if not necessarily justifiable, it is not surprising that the Terror seems completely an evil Jacobin plot. And certainly the Terror was awful. Indeed, the vast majority of women persecuted and killed in the Revolution were not the Sainte-Amaranthes or even the Léons – they were the women of the Vendée and Midi and the “pacified” cities. They were the women shot and bayonetted, not guillotined. They included *actual* peasants, not peasants as the word is apparently used to refer to all “poor persons” including Parisians demanding bread (pp. 344 and 347).
As a point of historical fact, it does not require a lot of imagination to make Robespierre the villain of a novel (even if I myself take a more nuanced view). He was indeed fanatical and paranoid. But, generally his enemies and friends, positive and negative sources alike, agreed that if there was one thing Robespierre was it was *not super into sex.* So the decision to make him some kind of dandy horndog aggressively pursuing– and then deciding to guillotine – Emilie Sainte-Amaranthe seems kind of gratuitous. UNLESS you consider this book not really as about women in the 1780s at all but instead about the travails and potentials of White Educated Middle-Class Liberal But Not Too Left-Wing American Women. Then this weird story about Robespierre, the personification of radical Revolutionary evil, attempting to sexually assault one of the characters – the reaction to whose death is literally seen as the reason for the end of the Terror - becomes symbolic of the deviousness of the patriarchy that pretends to be progressive. As Léon says, when expressing her [totally unrealistic] sympathy with Corday: “women could and did form and act upon their own opinions. And even the most progressive men seemed to have difficulty accepting that.”[ p. 414) Yet in its essentially centrist pro-moderate message – its clearest political trajectory seems to support Lafayette but would prefer the monarchy over the Jacobins – is not really rebellion. And, we might ask, is it really a step forward for women?
In short, this is a badly, even painfully, written unimaginative and thoroughly banal 550 page slog through a period in history that has already been fictionalized by much more skillful writers. Read them. Skip this.
I am an academic historian of French history whose fascination with the French Revolution spans over three decades. I am not, however, the kind of scholar who gets upset by occasional historical inaccuracies in fictional works or who will object if your approach to characters or narrative differs from the way I envision events, so long as you portray these in ways that make internal sense and bear some relation to historical reality. What I’m going to say about Ribbons of Scarlet involves less nitpicking factual errors with the presentation of revolutionary France than with examining the mediocrity of the novel’s historical imagination.
The best historical fiction immerses the reader in a world that is simultaneously unfamiliar and yet believable. It allows the reader to understand not just the facts that structure this foreign but human world but also the imaginaries that guide its characters’ beliefs and actions. It does so in a way that preserves the contingency and possibility of living at a moment as history is in the making – where characters talk and think *not* in the narratives that will later settle and enfold around them, but rather in the exhilarating chaos of *not knowing.* The best historical fiction takes us on a historical journey as well. Even passable historical fiction, novels that fall short of that standard of excellence, contains the following: fresh and engaging prose, characters who are unique and three-dimensional, and a vivid sense of the world in which those characters exist that conveys a vivid and visceral sensory experience for the reader.
Ribbons of Scarlet not only did none of these things, it went painfully above and beyond in failing to do these things.
This novel literally gave me a headache, but I pulled through and finished in a day because I knew that if I stopped I wouldn't muster the will to pick it up and write the scathing indictment it deserved.
Much of this novel reads like it was lifted directly from a Wikipedia article, dumping vast amounts of information on the reader at once while yet providing no deeper sense of the world the characters are navigating. It might be unavoidable in explaining an event as complex as the French Revolution to have the occasional information dump along the lines of “The Assembly began its attack on religion more than a year ago. First by placing the church’s property at the disposition of the government. Then by banning monastic vows and sentencing to death monks who failed to marry. And finally, by requiring all clergy to take an oath of loyalty to France. Most priests refused, as the oath conflicted with their duty to Rome by demanding they put nation before obedience to the pope. Such priests are labeled nonjuring, though I would call them the only true ecclesiastics in France.[173-174]” (These information dumps are particularly egregious when discussing anything related to slavery or the situation in Saint-Domingue. It's like "we don't really want to talk about this but we want to show we care about race issues"). However, similar “tell-not-show” passages happen repeatedly in Ribbons of Scarlet, leaving the novel sounding rushed and overeager. Instead of allowing the reader to experience this world, and find out the pieces of it in a way that would gradually come to make sense, we’re given the Cliff Notes version from some character’s head. Indeed, in reading this novel I thought frequently of when I assign my students French Revolution role-playing games. The goal in these games is to show you “know the information” and can articulate it through your character. If this was the purpose of an historical novel, then Ribbons of Scarlet would have succeeded, at least on this level. Sadly, it is not. The conversations between the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy are particularly unbelievable in this way. While I’m sure the author’s intention was to show that their marriage was a “meeting of minds,” no one talks so continuously in theoretical generalizations summarizing larger world views this side of an Ayn Rand sex scene.
The authors also periodically throw in random, distracting, and sometimes incorrect French, whose only apparent purpose is to “show the reader we are in France” rather than, say, convey words whose meaning has no direct English equivalent. Everyone* here would be speaking French so there’s no need to interject the perfectly translatable “calme-toi” or “incroyable” or “c’est joli celui là!” or “pots de chambre” (etc.) and there is certainly no need for the grammatically incorrect femmes sans-culottes (used as a singular noun) or the nickname Mousseline Serieuse (which should be Mousseline la Sérieuse). One sentence women are “women” and in the next they are “femmes;” “yes” or “correct” somewhere along the line become replaced by “oui” at the end of interrogative sentences. I make this remark not because I’m a French grammar Nazi, but because it exemplifies the gratuitous pretentiousness and superficial erudition of the novel more generally.
Even when the novel attempts to get beyond just recounting information to express feeling or passion, it is undermined on two fronts. First, very little attention is paid to the kind of research into the details of daily life during the Revolution – despite the numerous scholarly books on this subject – that would allow you readers to really immerse themselves in more than just the sheer narrative passage of events. What are characters eating, smelling, dreaming, buying, seeing, touching etc? Describe the visceral experience of macaron, don't just tell us it's one. And do so in a way that makes us feel that we are in a different era. Don't just superimpose our own experiences on to it. Louise Audu the fruit-seller slips into extra macarons into her sack --- seriously??? We are not 21st century marketing assistants here sneaking pastries from the company lunch into our purses. Similarly, when Manon Roland takes a random trip Caen to clear her head she seems to have taken the TGV rather than the *days* of uncomfortable travel to and from for her to just randomly appear somewhere else (and randomly bump into Charlotte Corday, since all characters in this novel are always inexplicably running into and/or thinking about other characters).
The French Revolution may have abolished the use of torture, but with the number of times that cheeks were growing hot, fear/dread/shivers were creeping up spines and “swells of emotions” were crashing over characters, I could swear these authors had reinstated it. When the language ventures into originality, it is a painful, halting venture still ridden with clichés. Take these two gleaming atrocities in Quinn’s chapter on Manon Roland: “in the dimpled salonnières like Sophie Condorcet who would fling mercy into the teeth of an entire hissing Convention” [318-319] and “in the eye of the storm, in the shadow of the guillotine, we all walked in the glint of lightning” [334]. Language is also tellingly anachronistic – such as Corday’s use of the term “propaganda” and Roland’s use of “atavistic.” The use of sometimes ridiculously heavy-handed clichés, particularly clichés that simply *tell* without accurately conveying the sensual experience of feelings, is illustrative of a larger lovelessness in the portrayal of the past. In place of a desire to understand characters and how they lived, there is a simplistic, rather stupid, political message of the present (GIRL POWER!) projected directly on to the past.
Indeed, despite the fact that these women, as historical characters, were intensely passionate people, and their era an intensely passionate one, the reader is repeatedly just told this and now allowed to work through it as s/he reads. For instance, here we have Pauline Léon: “This was the reason I was determined to give women a voice, and fight for our rights to bear arms, so that women could become equal in our new republic. This was the reason I woke every morning and started the day anew.” [343] Seriously, this is okay for your answer to some characterization prompt about what gets your character motivated. But in the actual novel you SHOW us that this is what motivates your character, you ILLUSTRATE this.
But it’s hard to show characterization when your characters aren’t really that different at all. Madame Élisabeth, Sophie de Condorcet, Pauline Léon, Louise Audu, Charlotte Corday, Manon Roland and Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe are very different women with not only very different opinions but actually different characters. But, in this telling, they are speak with more or less the same voice, with some minor variations (Audu and Léon are more ferocious, Roland and Condorcet more theoretical and Élisabeth and Corday more religious - and of course, as we’re reminded practically every 10-15 pages in case we forgot, Sainte-Amaranthe is BEAUTIFUL).
Indeed, despite the often life-and-death political differences that divide these women, their similarities lead them, at various moments in the prose, to various extremely unbelievable moments of recognition of themselves in others. At one point, the starving fruit seller Audu says of Madame Élisabeth: “Yet I knew her birth and status had trapped her in this moment. Despite her wealth and her brother and her fancy shoes, her status as princess forced her to bend to our will. The same way my poverty had forced me to bend to other wills.” [163] Likewise, Léon recognizes that Corday too is oppressed by being a woman and Elisabeth in Sophie de Condorcet. This would 100% not happen.
It’s almost as if these women are examining their counterparts through the 20-21st century sociological lens of race, class, and gender rather than the actual imaginaries of the world that illuminated actual people during this period. There is no attempt to really get us into the head of what these women believed, not in *our* feminist terms, but in their own – where discussions of women’s rights were part of discussions of family, divine right, religion, regeneration, citizenship and republicanism. When we are exposed to these characters, we need to understand that their mental constellations are *not* our own, and we need to be show how they configure the world not in our terms but in theirs.
This laziness - or deliberate and clumsy imposition of modern comfortably liberal (but NOT left) value systems onto the past - reveals itself in what we are supposed to take away from this book. In reality, the French Revolution both allowed women's voices to be heard and silenced those for being, as it is put by Sainte-Amaranthe, "too political, too intelligent, too opinionated, too daring, too pretty" (p. 497). The French Revolution killed a lot of women and the shutting down of the radical women's clubs and the misogyny that animated so much discourse against Marie Antoinette revealed a fundamental distrust of female power. BUT on the other hand, women gained during the Revolution unprecedented powers to divorce, to inherit property and to pursue the fathers of their illegitimate children for support. This is because the political imagination of the French Revolution was neither monolithic nor explicable in the terms of our own day; debates were rather guided by entirely different understandings of concepts of gender, family, and their relation to the nation-state. The authors of Ribbons of Scarlet make absolutely NO effort, despite the abundant scholarly literature - some of which they cite in their bibliography - to explore the logic that gives birth to such apparent contradictions.
This profound inability to truly recreate and empathize with these characters on their own terms and instead insert them into the narrative of White Educated Middle-Class American Women probably explains the single most bizarre deviation from the historical record in this novel – and one that is given no explanation in the end notes – the decision to portray Robespierre as a sexual assaulter.
Now, it’s hardly an original choice to villainize the Jacobins (or rather the Montagnards – the authors don’t really understand how contemporaries would have understood their political formations, as can be seen by their uses of the term “Girondins” and “Les Enragés”). And since there is basically NO mention of the dire realities of economic collapse, multiple civil wars and insurrections and a desperate struggle against *the entirety of Europe* that make the Terror, at least initially, explicable if not necessarily justifiable, it is not surprising that the Terror seems completely an evil Jacobin plot. And certainly the Terror was awful. Indeed, the vast majority of women persecuted and killed in the Revolution were not the Sainte-Amaranthes or even the Léons – they were the women of the Vendée and Midi and the “pacified” cities. They were the women shot and bayonetted, not guillotined. They included *actual* peasants, not peasants as the word is apparently used to refer to all “poor persons” including Parisians demanding bread (pp. 344 and 347).
As a point of historical fact, it does not require a lot of imagination to make Robespierre the villain of a novel (even if I myself take a more nuanced view). He was indeed fanatical and paranoid. But, generally his enemies and friends, positive and negative sources alike, agreed that if there was one thing Robespierre was it was *not super into sex.* So the decision to make him some kind of dandy horndog aggressively pursuing– and then deciding to guillotine – Emilie Sainte-Amaranthe seems kind of gratuitous. UNLESS you consider this book not really as about women in the 1780s at all but instead about the travails and potentials of White Educated Middle-Class Liberal But Not Too Left-Wing American Women. Then this weird story about Robespierre, the personification of radical Revolutionary evil, attempting to sexually assault one of the characters – the reaction to whose death is literally seen as the reason for the end of the Terror - becomes symbolic of the deviousness of the patriarchy that pretends to be progressive. As Léon says, when expressing her [totally unrealistic] sympathy with Corday: “women could and did form and act upon their own opinions. And even the most progressive men seemed to have difficulty accepting that.”[ p. 414) Yet in its essentially centrist pro-moderate message – its clearest political trajectory seems to support Lafayette but would prefer the monarchy over the Jacobins – is not really rebellion. And, we might ask, is it really a step forward for women?
In short, this is a badly, even painfully, written unimaginative and thoroughly banal 550 page slog through a period in history that has already been fictionalized by much more skillful writers. Read them. Skip this.
catrobindawg's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
dolphinlvr0920's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Terrific piecing together of 6 short stories by 6 incredible authors to tell the history of the French Revolution through the eyes of six women's lives who cross paths during this time period!
katevaliant's review against another edition
5.0
I received an ARC for review. Ribbons of Scarlet will leave your heart aching for the women of the Revolution. This novel follows the intersecting paths of six women during the French Revolution from triumphs to tragic ends.
I was impressed by the research that was clearly put into this and how well the different stories of the six women played into each other. Together, these stories gave a fascinating overview of the experience of women from all walks of life during the French Revolution and how their decisions changed the course of their fight not only for themselves, but other women. I don't think a single woman's story would be as powerful as these six combined proved to be. Very well written and I admit I was tearing up at the end. I also appreciated how this novel didn't shy away from the atrocities and tragedies of the revolution. Too many novels romanticize it, but this story was a gritty, realistic take on the struggles of the women who fought for freedom, equality, and their lives.
I was impressed by the research that was clearly put into this and how well the different stories of the six women played into each other. Together, these stories gave a fascinating overview of the experience of women from all walks of life during the French Revolution and how their decisions changed the course of their fight not only for themselves, but other women. I don't think a single woman's story would be as powerful as these six combined proved to be. Very well written and I admit I was tearing up at the end. I also appreciated how this novel didn't shy away from the atrocities and tragedies of the revolution. Too many novels romanticize it, but this story was a gritty, realistic take on the struggles of the women who fought for freedom, equality, and their lives.
ameliaamison's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
canadianbookworm's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
https://cdnbookworm.blogspot.com/2023/04/ribbons-of-scarlet.html