Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

This is a very confusing book; the first 100 pages or so are great and really suck you in and grip you and the same goes for the last 70 or so.  Unfortunately those myriad of pages inbetween are full of filler, banalities and only the odd nugget of plot development or character progression.  It almost felt as though the book was written and then someone somewhere decided that it needed more words, many more words, a surfeit of words so the entire mid-section was crafted.  I will readily admit that this came close to being a DNF because of this, I powered through with the help of copious amounts of caffeine and was ultimately glad I did because the pay off at the end of the book was worth it; just.

The blurb does sound very enticing and you expect to get a good old-fashioned saga.  There is an attempt at providing this but ultimately the characters just don't ring true on the page, you are constantly aware you are reading and that is a no-no for me.  I want to be transported in to the authors world and not just told about by the narrator.  In this case the narrator, Mabel Dagmar, is not a particularly warm or empathetic character and it is clear she is in this for what she can get.  This makes her not so very different to The Winslows and, indeed, the lines do get blurred so frequently that I did find myself having to re-read sections, much as Mabel herself does with Paradise Lost.

Indeed, it is clear that we are supposed to be drawing parables between Milton's long form poem and this story.  However, I felt that this was done in such a heavy handed and obvious way that it lost all veracity.  The writing itself is rambling and meanders through fairly mundane sections, picks up a thread and then leaves it dangling in perpetuity, moves off at a tangent and then finally gets back to the meat of the story.  It does mean that any revelation about The Winslow's history is diluted and I found I just didn't care about Birch and his current reign or Kitty and her previous ministrations to the family.  I think it says something when there are deaths of frequent characters (both by nefarious means and natural) and, as a reader, you just shrug and move on.

In short, this book is trying to be "something" and in trying so hard it fails to be "anything".  True, I have given it 3 Stars, but these are purely for the protracted set up and the denouement; the rest of it (including the epilogue) I could have happily managed without.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHER