Dina's Reviews > The Personal Librarian

I’m so disappointed with this one. The style of writing is primitive and boring, there is essentially no plot or any coherent storyline, and the main character is just horribly plain and uninteresting. Mostly, she’s just very annoying, repeating how she is the most famous and important person in New York a thousand times, while this is only due to her pleasing an influential rich man. She keeps reminding how “free” she is, even though all she does is follow the decisions of her mother or her employer, when the most independent choice she made was choose her expensive dresses of which we’re also unnecessarily reminded on every page. She’s generally just living a life of deceit trying to adapt to the whims of others to fund her nice things and preserve her inflated self esteem. Other than that, this woman has no distinct personality, except for this vanity and a habit of blaming her misfortunes on her being not white. This spoils the background racism narrative even further for me, and it’s a shame that this part about her pretending to be white wasn’t actually explored in the book more deeply. In the end, the whole text is just a repetition of how Belle is a star of posh boring parties for pretentious people who claim to understand high art but mostly spend time either buying or selling it to each other. I didn’t find any beautiful writing here, neither did I learn anything new or get inspired by old fashioned New York. Everything was too dry, too unoriginal. I almost feel upset about this. I’ve waited till the first half for something good to finally come out of it but it never did and I just don’t wanna waste my time any further on cliche descriptions of how Belle is swooning over one weird married man and then another weird married man who are somehow all so entranced by her. I’ve read cheesy young adult romance better than this.