I'll start off with the good things. Kearsley has a great talent for characters, and I always love hers. You really get to know the personality of the characters, as if they were real people. She's also quite good at settings and describing places in a way that you fee like you're there. Overall, until the very end, I liked Mariana. It had the depth of plot and emotion that I've come to expect from her other books.
All that said, the reason it only gets a 3 from me is that it starts out very slowly, and the ending is terrible. And it's not that it couldn't have been good...I don't object to it for what it is (trying to be specific without spoiling anything). It's that there was absolutely no set-up for it. I even went back and re-skimmed the book to make sure I hadn't missed any clues or build-up. But there wasn't. So, by the end of the book, I have very little emotional connection to the way it turned out, except for just trying to convince myself that if that's the way it worked out in the end, the everyone would be happy.
Also, having the first person for both the Julia and Mariana parts was a bit confusing, and even when I figured out the reason Kearsley was doing it, it still made it a bit difficult to track the plot and which time period things were happening in. Even if you argued that the reader is supposed to feel confused like Julia, it's a poor tactic, and it always just made me skip ahead a bit to figure out where I was.
Overall, this wasn't one of my favorites, which is too bad, because it was about 80% there.
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