Daffodils - Alex Martin - 2*

[Elise]

*This review will contain spoilers, but since they probably won't make you want to read the book, feel free to go ahead*

Katy Beagle is a servant in Cheadle Manor in England, early 1910s. Jem Phipps, the gardener, is interested in her but she has bigger dreams of leaving the country and her life. So she starts hanging out with Charles, the son of the family she serves, and when they're discovered she gets fired. So she finally accepts Jem's offer of marriage, and it turns out she loves him and the life they have together. They have a daughter, who gets typhoid and dies before her first birthday. Katy sinks into depression, and then gets pneumonia, and then Jem goes off to WWI. While he's gone, Katy pretty much moves back in with her parents. Then one day she goes home and gets a letter that Jem is missing, presumed dead. So she tries to kill herself, and Lionel White (the preacher who is hopelessly in love with her) rescues her, kisses her, takes her clothes off, proposes marriage, and gets mad when she refuses. Then Katy clicks that Jem is only PRESUMED dead, so she decides to join the WAAC to try and find him over in France. There she learns to be a mechanic for ambulances, makes a friend from the upper classes, Ariadne, and reunites with Cassandra, Charles's little sister (the guy she kissed years ago, remember him?) Meanwhile Lionel pops up every so often to continue being insulting, and then Jem shows up because of course he's not dead, and they live happily every after (or not - there are two sequels but I won't read them).

Hum, where to begin. All right, first off, I'll say the story had very good bones. The bit of Katy in the WAAC with Arry and Cass was the best and I actually enjoyed reading that. But as you can guess from my synopsis, there was way too much going on - and I didn't even get to the fight for running water, the fact that Charles and Albert, Katy's brother, died in the war, or the second job Katy gets at the manor. A lot of subplots and secondary characters could have been dropped, with the original plot (marriage and war) expanded to take the whole novel, and everything would just have been better, in my opinion.

Also, I found out later that this had been self-edited and, no offence to other self-edited novels out there, but it showed. Commas were severely abused in the writing of this story, and more than once the main characters' surnames were inverted, and it felt like, if the author seems to not care about her own characters to keep their names straight, how are we supposed to?

So unfortunately this felt a bit like a draft which could have benefited from some editing.

[Joanne]

You had me laughing....seemed like a disaster, you know you should just stop looking(or reading) but you can't help going back for more.....

[Elise]

Well I kept going with that one because it filled two categories in the Popsugar challenge, so I figured at least one good thing would come of it...