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A review by suzjustsuz
Girl Under Glass by Monica Enderle Pierce
3.0
There were things I quite liked about this book, but the things I didn't like were pretty glaring.
Pierce knows how to put a character through the ringer. The amount of abuse heaped on the heroine of this story is epic, right up there with an Anne Bishop heroine. It's so ongoing I became desensitized to it and just started expecting not only for her to be abused but for her to rationalize away any reason to stand against it. I did NOT like this part of this character, which is interesting because in spots she's plucky and "steel-spined" and brave. It's just inconsistent as hell.
I wanted to get on board with the romance and ship the H/h, but I kept feeling like I was getting whiplash from the way it happened. The transitions from not trusting to being all in were too quick and didn't make sense to me, nor did the heroine's transition from being angry about being deceived by her lover to being all in again. Those transitions didn't make sense to me, they read like I had missed a chapter or something. Besides, I'm a very hard sell on the Stockholm Syndrome trope and this book is one, of a sort.
As mentioned in a previous status update on this book, there wasn't a lot of morally nebulous characters here. Most of it was pretty black and white with only a few exceptions. The story is such that it could develop into more interesting and layered characters, but by and large most of them are 2 dimensional.
All that negativity aside, it's an interesting and exciting story that I intend to finish, which I'm sure that cliff hanger ending was supposed to assure and which only served to make me have to struggle against my knee-jerk tendency to write off cliff hanger series.
But this isn't a series, it's a duology, so I will finish it. But I'm still not sure I will read more of this author's work. Perhaps I will decide by the end of the next book.
Pierce knows how to put a character through the ringer. The amount of abuse heaped on the heroine of this story is epic, right up there with an Anne Bishop heroine. It's so ongoing I became desensitized to it and just started expecting not only for her to be abused but for her to rationalize away any reason to stand against it. I did NOT like this part of this character, which is interesting because in spots she's plucky and "steel-spined" and brave. It's just inconsistent as hell.
I wanted to get on board with the romance and ship the H/h, but I kept feeling like I was getting whiplash from the way it happened. The transitions from not trusting to being all in were too quick and didn't make sense to me, nor did the heroine's transition from being angry about being deceived by her lover to being all in again. Those transitions didn't make sense to me, they read like I had missed a chapter or something. Besides, I'm a very hard sell on the Stockholm Syndrome trope and this book is one, of a sort.
As mentioned in a previous status update on this book, there wasn't a lot of morally nebulous characters here. Most of it was pretty black and white with only a few exceptions. The story is such that it could develop into more interesting and layered characters, but by and large most of them are 2 dimensional.
All that negativity aside, it's an interesting and exciting story that I intend to finish, which I'm sure that cliff hanger ending was supposed to assure and which only served to make me have to struggle against my knee-jerk tendency to write off cliff hanger series.
But this isn't a series, it's a duology, so I will finish it. But I'm still not sure I will read more of this author's work. Perhaps I will decide by the end of the next book.