Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

SPOILER ALERT: Kitty O’Kane starts off as a bright, cheerful, courageous character. Yes, she does manage to survive an astonishing long list of famous historical disasters and dangers. But she doesn’t survive those things thanks to the slightest bit of personal courage or resourcefulness on her part. Not at all. She doesn’t even have enough *common sense* to duck when guns are firing (that happens several times), Kitty O’Kane is a appallingly passive, helpless female, whose only talent seems to be suffering and following along. She fails at everything else. She never has enough brains or gumption to save herself, always depending on a man to yank her out of danger. “Wha? Huh..? Okay.” And I’m not talking about an old-style damsel in distress story with a brave wonderful hero. Hooray.. romantic couple sails off into the lovelly sunset. Nope. This book is much darker than that. The men who save her from these disasters are no heros. They are narcisisstic bullies and cads, with no redeeming features. She moves in with them without love, without any hope of marriage or even basic respect. They demean her and use her, abuse her and humiliate her, day after day, year after year. She sees what they’re doing, and she certainly complains about it (OMG how she complains). But every time she gets to the point of leaving, every time she almost returns to a life of sanity and safety, every time I think "Okay, now she's figured it out, now she's going to save herself" --nope. She just goes right back to the abuser she never loved. Follows him, again and again, as he pursues dangerous, pathetically hopeless causes that she *never* believes in. Or, in another case, follows a gangster who promises nothing but beatings, jealousy and domination. “Wha? Huh..? Okay.” And every time she does that, she loses more and more self-respect. This is not a book about survival. This is a book about how a human being can get utterly degraded over time. So what if she finally ends up with the “Good Guy” in the last few pages of the book? The author has the two of them smiling and laughing over a cup of tea, as if everything is going to be okay now, because she finally found a “Good Guy”. All happy, all smiles. Seriously......? After reading a book where the historical narrative is *far* less compelling and dramatic than the explicit degradation of her human spirit, I don’t believe in this tralala happy ending for a moment. What’s worse, by the time I got to the last pages, I no longer cared.