You know when you have a long stretch of five star reviews and you start to wonder, are my standards super low? Does everything delight me? Am I some kind of a hack reader that just loves everything that passes in front of my eyes?
Well, if you have these concerns, may I highly recommend The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter to you. It will alleviate all of those suspicions, because it’s seriously the worst, and no one could possibly like it. How on earth there are any reviews on Goodreads over 2 stars for this piece of junk, I do not and will not ever understand.
It took me months to finish this book, even though it is an incredibly quick read. I simply could not pick it back up again except under duress and in the absence of anything else to read. I only finished it because I was on the subway one day and there wasn’t room in my bag for a real book, and here this was, still on my kindle app.
In short, it’s the story of a college professor with no impulse control who thinks she’s haunted by some kind of literary curse and lets herself be pushed around by everyone in both her personal and professional lives. She falls in love with a house that her husband and kids don’t really care about, and buys it for well over the amount that she and her husband agree would be the top limit of their budget during a time when it seems their current home will be impossible to sell. Some of her colleagues decide to use her as a pawn in their petty academic political drama, and she feebly protests under her breath but participates in that mess after all. There’s some kind of door-to-door salesman character with theoretically nefarious intentions who escalates his attempts to contact her, somehow finding her email address, OMG! No matter how many times she thinks “I don’t want to do this thing,” she ends up doing it anyway. Poor lady!
It’s muddy and frustrating and superficial. And I’m not interested in this woman’s victimhood in the most mundane situations, most of which are problems of her own making. No thank you please.
This was an Amazon Prime free book of the month from February, and is the second of these books that I’ve gotten to, though I download them every month (because free books are free)! It’s also the second disappointment from this program, and doesn’t lead me to look forward to getting to any of the others any time soon.