My largest critique was that the story dragged a bit at the midpoint, but that is a common issue in debut novels. A secondary critique is that the insertion of the character’s voices into the “text” of the book removed a significant portion of the suspense, because the reader already knows that everyone survives. My enjoyment of the color commentary mostly surpassed this issue.
I didn’t know how much I needed this meld of classic fictional characters until I was in the midst of the story. The feminist take on many of the stories did nothing but improve the overall effect, and I look forward to continuing the trilogy and seeing where Goss takes our intrepid heroines.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) stars. Cross-posted to Amazon and Goodreads.
This is a really nice series. The author actually came to my area and talked about the research that she did for this series, and it was SUPER interesting. She made a lot of effort to be authentic to the time/place.
I can see your point about inserting the character’s voices, it would definitely ruin the suspense. I’m glad the book was fun overall, and it sounds like the good definitely outweighed the bad!