The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

I always find it difficult to be cruel when reviewing or discussing another author's work. The time, energy and imagination it takes to write 300 pages only to read a review that is less than stellar can only be painful. That said, I HATED this book and am entirely happy that it will not be cluttering my bookshelves. The author's writing styles is tedious and trite, her descriptions include more detail than anyone could want and her character and plotline are predictable and annoying.

The main character, Elizabeth Holland, is impossible to like. Not only do you start to hope that her rivals in love will win Will's affection from Elizabeth, you hope that her fall into the Hudson River was real and she won't be appearing in the remainder of the book. Each character follows a similar predictable, hatable pattern. Anna Godbersen obviously researched a great deal about the wealthy and their habits in Old New York, but she didn't use the descriptions or the city in a manner that would have made her novel more engaging. Even the leading man, Will, is simply a foil, a hollow shell of a person that the reader has difficulty liking. What kind of hero ditches his true love after a week? What kind of love is it if no communication between the two parties ever occurs? Perhaps their midnight booty calls are all either of them like, but in that case, they should both be able to move on.

The writing style of Godbersen is verbose. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs simply because I wasn't interested enough in the story or the book to go back and read them. When I forced myself to read them again, I found that they were just a boring and insignificant as hey looked. Pragraph after paragraph fails to move the plot to its painfully obvious conclusion. Long-winded sentences describing wedding dress fabrics and the descriptions of the supposed boring backgrounds fill page after page with drivel.

Overall, if I could do it again, I would like my five hours back. And this will be returned to the library immediately as I don't appreciate keeping such an embarrassing and poorly written work of fiction disgracing authors such as Charlotte Bronte and Stephanie Meyer as they sit together on my bookshelf.