Review: Lady Jayne Disappears

Lady Jayne Disappears by Joanna Davidson Politano

Rating: DNF

I struggled to get through this book for a week, but finally gave up at about 60%. I probably could have finished it, but life is too short to read bad books.

I had a couple of issues with this book. The main one was that it was so boring. I read 258 pages before giving up, and nothing happened in said 258 pages, except for the heroine Aurelie writing, praying, and having really obnoxious self-doubting monologues. It's marketed as a gothic mystery, and at first I thought that's what it was going to be. I expect Aurelie to sleuth around and uncover the great mystery of what happened to Lady Jayne, but at 60% into the book, she hadn't done anything like that. I skimmed the last bit of the book and the great mystery was all revealed in about the last 10 pages of the book, without even the true benefit of a "reveal." The other characters basically just told her what happened, finally. Politano wasted roughly 400 pages by choosing that as the method of reveal in my opinion. I also felt like the twist at the end was supposed to be this huge shock, but it also fell flat even as I skimmed through to the end. 

I also didn't enjoy the Jasper story line, and to be honest, I'm not sure what purpose it served at all, except to create unnecessary conflict. If Politano had focused more on the mystery aspect and worried less about conflict between Juliette and Aurelie (and everyone else), the story would have been much better. That conflict, like so much of the book, simply felt like filler. However, all the filler meant that the plot line that could have really been interesting was neglected and not nearly as good as it could have been. 

This falls into the category of Christian fiction, although there's no way to know that until you've started. That in and of itself wouldn't be a problem, but the faith element is written so poorly. There's no naturalness to it; the prayers/invocation of God are dropped into the story often seemingly at random, in such a clunky and awkward way, it really interrupted the flow of the story. Along with that, much of the dialogue and especially the dialogue regarding faith is so sappy-sweet it made my teeth hurt. 

I really tried to like this one, but in the end, it just wasn't for me. Thank you to NetGalley for a review copy of this book.