A Memory of Violets by Hazel Gaynor

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.

I got an Advance Reader's Copy of this book, even though I didn't actually finish reading it until I had been out for over a month.  But what can you do?  I was intrigued by the concept of the book.  I love period pieces and I was drawn in by the idea of the book being about "London's Flower Sellers," something that I don't know anything about.  This book, though, seemed lost, like it couldn't figure out what it wanted to be.  At first it flipped between Tilly's story (told from a third person narrator) and a first-person account of Florrie's life.  Suddenly we had sections of the stories told through Florrie's diaries, newspaper articles, letters, and even sections told from the perspective of ghosts (which I am still a little confused about, to be honest).  It felt like Gaynor wanted to try a lot of different styles of writing and decided this book was the place to experiment with all of them.

That said, I enjoyed the story for the most part.  None of the twists were as surprising as they were supposed to be and everything wrapped itself up far too easily.  For the amount of complicated ideas and plots that I though had or were being set up, the end came together in a neat little bow in the course of only a couple of pages.  While there were hints of the supernatural throughout the entire book, the ending seemed filled with it, acting as a plot device to pull everything together.  I put the book down and didn't feel fulfilled.  I was left wondering why, exactly, I had decided to spend my time with these characters.  This book may have been 400 pages long, but they were a fast 400 pages.  I feel like there was more story here and I would have liked to hear it rather than having the perfect ending thrust upon me all of the sudden.

All of that said, I give it 2 out of 5 Sequinbeasts.