I wanted to enjoy reading this, but I didn’t. For a start it was unnecessarily long and slow, taking far too long to patronisingly spell-out the relatively simple plot. This wouldn't have been a problem if the characters were one-third as interesting as they thought they were. Unfortunately they were very dull, very basic, and very self-absorbed. Also none of them, most particularly the modern-day heroines, seemed even slightly like actual people. The character-mirroring across generations only served to exaggerate how poorly-differentiated the individual characters actually were. The plot itself was in many cases both implausible and overfamiliar, and the storytelling required a greater interest in beautiful young people flirting that I personally possess. The narrator’s voice was a grating distraction. The story was muddled. A lot of the events seemed ultimately irrelevant at least to me, and sometimes bafflingly unlikely. The overall mood was “YA author with an eye on a TV/film adaptation”. It was readable enough, I suppose. But my overall feelings were boredom and mild irritation.

Also, I know this is a minor quibble, but the edition I read is filled with footnotes indicated by asterisks so tiny that I had to search the page to find them. My progress through the dense porridge of this book was slow enough without having to constantly retrace my steps to scrabble around looking for miniscule stars leading to pointless remarks.