The French Girl by Lexie Elliott
My rating: 3/5 cats
i’m in the minority with my unenthusiastic response to this one, so feel free to dismiss my opinion outright. because not only did i read it wrong, apparently, but i was so dismayed at not having the same happy fun time with it as all the other readers that i put off writing my review and now it is many months and many books later and i can’t make sense of my notes, nor remember much about what wasn’t working for me here.
what i do remember is probably not helpful to someone reading the finished copy, but there were a lot of typos in the arc that were distracting. not the misspelling/unclosed parentheses kinds, but the “this is not the word you want” kinds, where “discreet” was used in place of “discrete” and “prevaricate” instead of “procrastinate,” etc. which wouldn’t even be worth mentioning ordinarily, since arcs always have a few errors and they’re usually caught and corrected during the editorial passes made before pub date, but there were more than usual this time, and the nature of them strikes me as more of a writing issue than a copyediting issue. so it’s worth bringing up because i had another problem with the writing that may or may not be related – i’m not sure if it was an oversight now corrected or a deliberate writerly decision, but there was a lot of repetition in this book; words or phrases that would recur in too-close proximity – either within a few sentences or in the following paragraph, and it made for an unpleasant echo effect that also distracted me, pulling me out of the story.
these are minor quibbles, but if they affect the reader’s engagement in the story, they matter. a strong novel can recover from a reader’s attention-lapses. this one wasn’t giving me enough zazz to prevent me from noticing its missteps, whether they were arc-specific missteps or not.
maybe i’ve read too many books about groups of friends with seeeecrets, but this one was a little too slow and a little too predictable for me. i wasn’t interested in any of the romantic entanglements, past or present, so all of that anxious hand-wringing was wasted on me.
the struggles of kate’s legal headhunting firm were even less interesting to me than who was kissing whom, and do not get me started on that ghost. there was just a lot of clutter weighing down what was already a slow-paced book.
so, yeah, i read it wrong and it was a low three stars for me, although i kind of dug the unexpected resolution. not the who/why/howdunnit, because that was no shocker, but the fallout for the guilty party – an interesting choice, there.
so i’m grateful, as always, for the opportunity to read a book early, and i am even more grateful that i now have a pair of sunglasses that accurately informs curious passers-by of my gender and ancestry.
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a fancy book package???
don’t mind if i do!!
