Reviews and Comments

I feel like I suffered through this one and I'm having Thoughts about it. I would have stopped listening, but I didn't really have an alternative lined up and when I'm at work and want something to listen to after having run out of podcast episodes, I don't really have the time or opportunity to leisurely browse for anything else. So we hoick the speed up to x1.7 and get on with it.

My problems were several and some of them nit-picky.

1. The beginning was so slow. SO slow. As each sister arrive we go through the same conversations again and again only with different participants.

2. This is ultimately a book about men getting or trying to get women to do what they want. Some of it, I realise, is a product of the time period being portrayed, but a lot of it is just pushy, especially towards an old, dying woman who has told them in no uncertain terms she does not wish to see them, she does not wish to talk to them and she does not wish to tell them any stories. In fact she very much wants them to go away and maybe stop trespassing into her garden, peering through her windows and harrassing her servant. "But it's about Maia's family history! She has a right to knoooooow!!!111!!" No. She does in fact not. She was adopted to a loving parent. She has a right to ask. The family that gave her up has a right to refuse to answer. But then of course there would be no book.
There's also the wonderfulness of a woman who asks a man politely to please not patronise her, and he then mansplaining why she should continue to let him do so, which indeed he does, no apologies given. There's a whole Pretty Woman-esque sequence where she's told she dresses unattractively and is being equipped with an outfit she would never have chosen for herself which leads me directly to,
3. Look! Women do not have to dress like a sex bomb in order to please men. Comfortable clothing is comfortable, end of story. A woman is allowed to be comfortable. Just because she prefers comfortable clothing doesn't necessarily mean she's hiding from anything or anybody, and if she is living somewhat reclusively, it doesn't necessarily mean she has no life at all. This whole passage was down-right cringy. I had some dislike for Pushy Floriano from the beginning, and this bit did NOT endear him to me further.

4. The complete personality transplant of Gustavo. Also, a man who routinely rapes his wife cannot ever EVER be described as "a good man." One could maaaaaaybe offer a slight bit of leniency if he genuinely didn't know he was doing it wrong and hurting her, but all shreds of this goes away when he himself promises her an end to it being forced on her. This is unprompted by the wife, who couldn't even bring herself to complain directly about it to her confidants. Meaning, he was fully aware that it was rape the whole time and still carried on doing or attempting to do it. How is this "a good man?"

5. Great pains are being taken to describe Brazil as a melting pot. Great pains are also being taken to describe a character as 'looking Brazilian'. Surely these two things would exclude each other. You cannot look characteristically Brazillian while also saying that it's a melting pot of many different nationalities. Especially when it's a European person. Guess where most of the immigrants for this melting pot came from. Yes, they came from Europe (probably mostly voluntarily) or from Africa (definitely not voluntarily). So what exactly do you look like if you look Brazillian? It probably irks me more as well, because I happen to know someone who comes from Brazil and she looks just as European as every body else around here.

6. Why are so many of these characters so completely stupid that they would have all these private, intimate and incriminating conversations while being driven around by chauffeurs? Do they think their drivers are deaf?

7. The tendency to want to rob other people of their grief. Making sure to have a secret funeral before one's children is even told of one's passing. Refusing to tell a spouse that one is terminally ill with only a few months to go. Oh they did not want their loved ones to worry. They did not want them to go to the trouble of arranging stuff. Piffle. If this was done to me, and I do mean 'done to', I would not be a greatful little lamb and think them oh so considerate. I would be livid.

8. While this is indeed a very tragic little tale of Maia's ancestors, what in the world does it have to do with why she was adopted? Those were her great-grandparents. Who decides to give children up for adoption based on whether or not their grandparents had extra-marital affairs? Why waste some 15 or 16 hours on something that is ultimately irrelevant, and then have the actual circumstances of her birth confined to a little half hour summary near the end. A good b-plot could easily have been built around that instead, but of course it wouldn't have been as romantic as arranged marriages, wife-rape and adultery.

I suspect the other books in the series is going to be the same. Each sister trying to figure out where she's from while learning about some distant ancestors for the sole purpose of planting a Pa Salt clue, so that it can all lead up to a Pa Salt book, which probably could have stood just as well on its own. Indeed the very last chapter being written from the POV of the next sister is very much intended to draw me in for the next book in the series.

It has failed. I shall leave that for someone else who will appreciate it more than I did.