Loved it. My favorite stories are of characters who protect another no matter their pride, or who fight for and believe in another person no one else does, including themselves. This has that in spades. Jasper and Julia had such a beautiful humility and eventual trust - hard won of course.

I didn’t want it to me but couldn’t put it down. Really enjoyed this so much.

While the concept of finding beauty out of brokenness is one of my favorites, so I love that someone tackled it, the book itself was very slow and repetitive.

This was a weird mix of mysticism, Christianity, Islam, maybe a couple others, philosophy and I guess just fairy tale. While there were some good takeaways you can equate to choosing your perspective, and believing things work together and can work together for a purpose, I just didn’t care for the odd fairy tale nature of it.

Ultimately I think the thing I struggled the most the more time has passed after reading it, was that it was just so self-focused. Santiago had to complete his quest and his own "personal legend" regardless of anyone around him. The frequent statements of universe conspiring to help you achieve whatever your dreams/purpose are spoke to this all-about-me sort of mindset. It was't about helping each other, looking out for someone else or sacrificing, it was just about how to achieve what I want for myself. I don't think that's what life should be about. Yes I get that alchemy is about making something better but it was solely about making his own situation or what he himself wanted better. Not anyone else. Everyone else had to go about their business while Santiago took care of his own desires and quest.

Also if I heard “personal legend” one more time I was about ready to yell at the book. There was a lot of it that just felt so repetitive.

I liked the story itself of The Accidental Suffragist, and information on the Suffragist movement, but honestly the book really was rather 2 dimensional. I think the framework was there that it could’ve been so much better but it just lacked being fleshed out. Because of that it felt sort of flat and a little disappointing.

There were so many gaps in the story and a lack of character development that I couldn’t really get invested in any of the characters or form an opinion. It was just odd. For example, most of the time I couldn’t figure out if I liked Albert as a person or not because his character kept flipping between really poor qualities and really good ones but the author didn’t flesh any of his character out or even his relationship with Helen. It made a lot of their interaction really confusing to me. Same with Walter - one chapter would talk about him not making eye contact but it never went into why or who he was. You just had to make assumptions.

Instead of better character development, at times there were chapters or topics that seemed extremely random and didn’t lend any quality or context to the story. They just felt completely thrown in and pointless. Mentioned out of nowhere and never mentioned again like Albert with the woman at the bar, the pregnancy scare, etc.

There were also inconsistencies with the timeline. The years or months didn’t always add up and I found myself going back and re-reading sections thinking I missed something only to solidify I read it right, the timing was just wrong.

Also there is were a number of typos and bizarre use of “Ya” or variations of. It was used interchangeably for “you”, “your”, “you’re”, “yes”, “yeah”…. but only randomly. I don’t know if the author intended to convey slang or a NYC accent or what but the dialogue would switch from normal grammar, to using “ya” the next couple sentences, and then back to normal grammar again. It made it super awkward and confusing both trying to translate which word they were using for it, and what I was supposed to be envisioning the character to be. She should have just stuck with one form or the other consistently and also not used it for multiple words.

All in all, I liked the information and story of this book but I feel like it fell short of its potential and in effect, really being something I could fully enjoy the way it was written.

Thank you to Book Publicity Services for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.