I wanted to like this so badly. It's right up my alley: a tough smart girl carves out a place in the world in an interesting historical setting. But I've had this from the library for 6 weeks and I've made it 30 pages, and every one of those 30 pages has felt like a chore. I will do almost anything to avoid picking this up. The house has never been so sparkling clean.

So. Even though I want to like this, I also want to read books that I enjoy reading. And I don't enjoy reading this. I don't feel like I can give a good reason why I don't like it (I've only read 30 pages, after all, which isn't enough time to really get under the skin of the characters or figure out the dominant narrative arc or even get into the flow of the book's language), but here we are, and 6 weeks is enough time wasted on a book I don't want to read. And so, back to the library it goes; no star rating, because I can't in good conscience give a star rating to a book I've read so little of.