Welcome to my February wrap-up. February was definitely a crappy reading month, I read 2 books in total so there isn’t really much to wrap-up but here it goes.
The Wicked Cometh* by Laura Carlin (4 stars)
When her parents pass away Hester White is taken in by her family’s gardener and his family. She’s desperate to get out of the slums of London, until one day she gets her wish. She’s ran over by a rich doctor who not only heals her, he also decides to send her to live with his sister to try to see whether or not the poor can be educated (he believed Hester to be uneducated and she doesn’t correct him as she’s worried she’ll miss her chance to get out). At the same time people are going missing, and Hester’s hosts are somehow in the middle of it. The Wicked Cometh is a great historical novel with a big mystery in the middle and an LGBTQ romance. I found it to be an enjoyable read but the ending was a little dragged out and not of my liking.
The Mermaid and Mrs Handcock* by Imogen Hermes Gowar (3 stars)
The Mermaid and Mrs Handcock follows Mr Handcock, who is a merchant, starting when the captain of his ship returns from a voyage telling him he sold his ship to buy a mermaid and Angelica Neal, whose husband passed away recently, forcing her to go back to working as a courtesan. I have mixed feelings about this one. I felt like the pace was painfully slow (which I don’t mind when the characters are really complex and I want to understand every single tiny thing about them, but that wasn’t the case with these characters until much later in the story), so much that I went through the best part of a month never feeling like reading anymore and considered not finishing the book several times which is unusual for me. However, once I was down to the last 30% or so I basically read it all in one go and loved it, hence the reason for my mixed feelings. I feel like had the book taken less time to really kick off it’d be one of my favourite reads of the past year, but since it didn’t I’m not quite sure where to place it.
*I received a copy of the book through netgalley in exchange for an honest review
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