What a disappointment.

You ever read something that SHOULD be everything you love, but wasn't? Ugh. The premise: Miss Prudencia Prim, a young woman who moves into a small village to be a librarian to a mysterious expert in dead languages. As she fixes up his collection of tomes, Miss Prim is slowly changed by many heated debates with her employer, the friendly overtures of the eccentric community, and the fascinating if off-putting worldview they all seems to possess (not to mention the spiritual heart of it).

I made that sound way more interesting than it actually was.

The book has four major problems. Firstly, it panders to Catholics. And you'd THINK this would still be perfect for me, considering that I am a devout Catholic (reader, I was ready to be pandered to), but my gosh, the absolute condescension to the main character annoyed me to no end. No one ever explains anything. It's all very well to quote Chesterton and Newman, to throw around the ideals of a distributionist society, to reference concepts like 'the icon is a window'. But I know these things and love them because I learned about them. The writer just leaves them...hanging there, with Miss Prim blinking at the ideas confusedly. And I'm supposed to buy that that's attractive for a skeptic?

Secondly, the underdeveloped characters. If you tilt your head and squint, you can see what the writer was kind of going for. Mysterious employer and passionate convert. World-weary, cynical woman. Strange and lovable villagers. The outline is there, but the substance isn't. The majority of the characters are defined by one or two vague traits and exist largely as mouthpieces of the Catholic worldview. The mysterious employer (who is never named???) is the loudest mouthpiece, and most irritating, and supposedly perfect and never wrong even when he is. (It's that last trait that's the most grievous literary sin for me, and also low-key feels insulting for my faith too. It's like, once you're Catholic, you're immune to deep self-reflection and change. Ugh.) And Miss Prim? She's not a character. Gosh, I wish she was. But her beliefs and outlooks are as moldable as cheese. She never puts up a fight for the precepts she lives by - obviously, her employer and the villagers she just met are correct. You think she's prim and proper and slightly uncomfortable around children, and out of nowhere she's winking and indulging them and asking for a kiss. You think she's thorough, and she turns out to not have done any research about the position (lampshaded in the book at least). She's not a character. She is A Person That Exists To Be Converted. And that, dear reader, is exactly how you cheapen the conversion story.

Thirdly, the internalized misogyny. The book can have a drinking game: take a shot whenever a character insults women. Holy Mary, Mother of God, help me. There's a passage about how women don't write literature worthwhile enough for men to read. Another about how women's talk usually only comprise of chit-chat. When Miss Prim says she doesn't identify as a feminist, her employer/love interest praises her, and she blushes. I wanted to break something. And this, by the way, is why the main romance of the book is awful. The love interest never learns from Miss Prim. And despite him saying the words "I respect you", I'm unconvinced he actually DOES. She's always amusing to him. He continually patronizes her, and she accepts it while doing some token grumbles that attempts to pantomine some kind of enemies-to-lovers thing but falls so very flat. The book professes that marriage shouldn't be equal, that it's supposed to be that each person thinks their counterpart as the superior, but like, that's not the problem. The problem is that she's younger (the author threw in an age gap), that he's her employer, and that their conversations feel like soliloquies wherein he's just continuously affirmed. Mr. Rochester was better than this guy, and when I say that Mr. Locked-wife-in-an-attic was less aggravating that's saying something.

Fourthly, the pacing. I won't get into this much, but the pacing was all over the place. I don't mind slow pacing. I mind when a large amount of character development happens off-screen. I mind when there is no resolution and the book just ENDS. I don't even get the satisfaction of a pay-off. Ugh. 

Giving this 1.5 stars (in contrast to zero) because as horrible as it was, I didn't quit reading it. I guess I kept hoping it'd get better. There are traces of something truly charming there, and I wish the writer had a better editor to help her concretize it. I'll also give it some grace because it's a translation, the setting was charming enough, and there were a few interesting subplots here and there that I really wished were followed up on.

In short, I do not recommend. If you want something like this book but better, I recommend The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion--another story of a young woman stepping into a small, eccentric community, but with far better execution in both story and themes. 

I read the end of this book, closed it, opened it and re-read the last few pages, closed it again, and then felt myself go "What did I just read?" Ultimately, wholly, unsatisfying. The premise is cute, the setting is adorable, the literary references abound. However, both main characters are arrogant and preachy and annoying. I wanted growth from them both. I wanted to witness compromise and truly logical arguments and banter that had real depth. I was so frustrated with their banter because I felt rarely did either one make a strong, cogent, fact or logic-based argument. Both were entirely dismissive of the other. The townspeople often made good points but then those went wasted. The author introduced backstory for multiple characters then just left it undeveloped or used it to develop the main character partially but never fully rounding it out. 

I assume the author was writing a treatise/indictment of the "modern woman" and has a very false notion of what the "feminist" movement means - because Miss Prim is *not* a modern woman, nor a feminist. Nor does being a feminist always put a person at odds with Christianity or religion or family. This plot point rides through the entire book and then just...poof...never resolves. 

I've read others who insist the point of the book is to explore the inner life of the main character. If that's true - not. worth. it. In fact, I'm going to have to shift down to a 2.5. 

What a strange book. It builds like a romance without the usual racy moments, but dripping with misogyny. A paternalistic, arrogant, self-serving man continually puts down a sensitive, clever woman whose only fault (aside from perfectionism) is youth. And somehow this is supposed to come across as love. The attempts at clever twists of logic between the two main characters fell flat for me; they just seemed pretentious and overwrought. The overall idea behind the book has some merit but I didn't need a story about women's "sentimentality" and  "necessary" deference to older, wiser men who choose to be cryptic and academic when they could just be direct and realistic.