A review by rhensie
Plain Bad Heroines, by Emily M. Danforth

4.0

This tome of a novel.... Where to begin?

I think that, if I'm being 100% honest, I would rather the book was just written in the singular (1900s) timeline, without the modern-day wrapping. More time is spent in the modern day, but I found myself just wishing to get back to Alex and Libbie.

The ending... especially of the modern-day story, is... not great. I was expecting another modern-day section after that one, expecting an actual climax/tense ending, but it didn't happen. I also never really bought the whole

Spoiler

'filming all of your candid moments without everyone being aware of it'

stuff, so I guess that made the modern-day 'big event' not very convincing too, because it revolved about that. The pacing is also off - at page 300 or so I was like 'when is something gonna happen?', and then at page 580, I was like 'well, there's no where near enough time now to wrap this up properly'.

But this is not to say I did not enjoy this book, because I did. It was a long read, at many times it felt it should have been cut down to maybe 400 pages or so, but it was fun and creepy and sapphic. With the maybe exception of Merritt, I enjoyed spending hours with these ladies. It is also clearly ambitious and took a lot of skill to pull off as much as it did, even with its flaws, and for that it edges up into the 4-star category for me.