Short version: The ending ruined this book. Dee-readful.

74. Hearts Strange and Dreadful – Tim McGregor

We can’t have a successful underdog, can we? Not here. You can lose your parents in a fire, come to live with relatives who make you their main maid instead of allowing you to be a relative and guest with your “I just lost my whole family and my face is burned, so I am totally self-conscious” grief, use your very useful old timey medical knowledge to do the best to help with an unforeseen malady, get constantly insulted by some asshole named Tom, know your future was basically extinguished by the fire because no one will want to marry the maid with the scar, help figure out the supernatural elements of what’s plaguing your town, and do some gruesome stuff to save your family and the town as well from evil…and yet, the author is going to screw you over in the end too.

Hester knew her life was not going to be great – and it isn’t. And it will stay bad or get worse. And that is not a fun read for anyone who feels like an outsider or anyone who likes to see the heroine’s journey end with some well-deserved credit. It is fiction, Tim, you don’t have to keep dumping on the woman and leave her with her stupid crush as the only “good” thing she gets for all her sorrows.

The thing I see coming to her is an abusive relationship, because throwing an egotistical user together with someone who loves them even though they shouldn’t is one of the ways that happens. He will take advantage and blame her for his own bad decisions and she will be deluding herself that she’s got what she wanted, which is exactly what that ending scene says to me.

Hester would have been better off dying in the ending fire with Will, who actually cared about her and helped her with the evil. But Will lives, so she’ll know there is someone who cares about her and didn’t want to make her the maid around to see her humiliated by her husband. If she had run into Will on that night she ran away instead of her dumbass crush Henry, it would have been a better scene, a better book, and not just another reminder for women who don’t behave or live up to ridiculous beauty standards that their future is humiliation and not respect, just out of circumstance.

 

Salem always reacted to guinea pigs making noise on my TV, so I know he is more than willing to save any ladypigs from being humiliated by circumstance. He’s cute and concerned.