Review: Journey's End

Journey's End by Renee Ryan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS...
True reading pleasure for the most part. One thing this book has that is deeply annoying is the rehashing of territory already covered. There is a difference between discussion for solutions, and discussion to remind of what's gone before. That is okay for a serial in a monthly magazine, but not okay in a novel length book that one might read in an evening or Saturday afternoon.

Introspection of characters is good and necessary for story flow, but rehashing the same thing over and over is an insult to readers' intelligence as if we can't remember what we've read two chapters ago. It is a wordy way to pack a story to an acceptable page length. If an author must do that, it would be better to add a character than to have character's never grow past their initial mindset. You keep reading, hoping something will happen to make the character grow up... and it does... but the character stays in the rut. That is not good writing.

However, the characters in this book are very well developed and quite interesting. Each character has a charming uniqueness that does move the story along (although a bit slowly). I do recommend this book, but buyer beware: It has a soap opera feel to it.

About the book...

Having grown up on the mean streets of nineteenth-century London, Caroline St. James is used to fighting to survive.

So when her beloved mother—abandoned and ignored by her wealthy family—suddenly dies, the scrappy twenty-two-year-old devises a plan to right this terrible wrong. With nothing to lose, she sails to New York to find the man who turned a cold shoulder to her mother’s suffering: Caroline’s grandfather.

To settle the family score, Caroline infiltrates her grandfather’s privileged world, hoping to sabotage his business from the inside. But as she sets her plot in motion, she meets Jackson Montgomery, a virtuous man who is struggling to recover from a family scandal of his own. As their friendship grows, and Caroline begins to piece together the motives that led her family to turn its back, she is forced to make a decision: Should she risk everything in the name of justice? Or can she look toward the future and let love and forgiveness guide her instead?


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