{"id":317,"date":"2009-02-24T21:42:16","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T01:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/?p=317"},"modified":"2009-02-24T21:42:16","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T01:42:16","slug":"envy-by-anna-godbersen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/envy-by-anna-godbersen\/","title":{"rendered":"Envy by Anna Godbersen"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was really, really looking forward to reading Envy<\/a><\/em> over my vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 Good, light, lusty historical fiction – an excellent vacation book.\u00c2\u00a0 And I enjoyed its two predecessors, The Luxe <\/em>and Rumors<\/em>; though they’re not great literature, they are engaging and have just enough history in them to balance the blueblood romantic shenanigans.\u00c2\u00a0 Like chocolate frosting on a saltine.<\/p>\n

But what a disappointment Envy <\/em>was!\u00c2\u00a0 The writing is simply atrocious in spots, plodding in others, never sparkling, never fun.\u00c2\u00a0 It feels as if Godbersen was rushed to a deadline and the book was under-edited.\u00c2\u00a0 Or perhaps she is sick of writing about these people and her heart wasn’t in it this time.\u00c2\u00a0 Or both.\u00c2\u00a0 Whatever the reason, I winced at word usage more times than I can count, and I got very<\/em> tired of reading detailed clothing descriptions when a bit of romantic action would have been much more interesting.<\/p>\n

Which was the main problem with the story:\u00c2\u00a0 there wasn’t much of a story.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike the two previous books, the characters don’t end up very far from where they started 416 pages earlier.\u00c2\u00a0 Diana is still pining for Henry, Penelope has become a bore (what happened to the Penelope we loved to hate?), Liz is stultifyingly dull, and Henry is just a sad drunk.\u00c2\u00a0 Carolina makes the most progress, and she was the character I liked most at the end of Rumors<\/em>, but even her journey in this third book left me bored.\u00c2\u00a0 Bored, bored, bored.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lisa, another\u00c2\u00a0Luxe <\/em>series fan,\u00c2\u00a0also read Envy <\/em>last week, and had much the same\u00c2\u00a0reaction that I did (though she did cite a\u00c2\u00a0particular plot point that had slipped my mind, using\u00c2\u00a0a highly descriptive word,\u00c2\u00a0and challenged me to “put THAT on your blog!” – which I won’t).\u00c2\u00a0 Lisa pointed out that this third book seems to have been written simply to set up the reader for the fourth book.\u00c2\u00a0 I wonder if either of us will even want to read that fourth book when it comes out…I doubt that I will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was really, really looking forward to reading Envy over my vacation.\u00c2\u00a0 Good, light, lusty historical fiction – an excellent vacation book.\u00c2\u00a0 And I enjoyed its two predecessors, The Luxe and Rumors; though they’re not great literature, they are engaging and have just enough history in them to balance the blueblood romantic shenanigans.\u00c2\u00a0 Like chocolate … Continue reading Envy by Anna Godbersen<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-young-adult-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}