Monday, July 25, 2016

Review: The Second Mrs. Hockaday by Susan Rivers

Advanced review copy from publisher via NetGalley. My opinions are my own.

Release Date: January 10, 2017

This novel about a young woman who is thrust into a hard life as the wife of an absent soldier and farmer during the American Civil War is told through letters, diaries, and other documents. At only 17 years old, and after only one week at her new home, she is left alone to care for her husband's farm and his son by his previous marriage as he returns to the battle front. When he finally returns two years later, he finds his young wife has given birth to another man's child in his absence, and is being accused of murdering the infant.

I struggled to read this at first, because all dialogue described through the letters or journals is completely unquoted. I'm not sure why, because any quote should be in quotation marks, regardless of whether it's within a letter or diary or not. It was very difficult to know whether the start of a sentence was going to be narrative or dialogue until you reached the end of the sentence. It felt very disjointed.

But the other reviewers seemed to rave about it, so I stuck with it, and it did get easier to read. However, I found myself simply not caring very much about the characters or what happened to them, and I struggled to finished it.



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