Beguiled (Large type / large print)

Disappointing and annoying

The only engaging moments in this book (the only book not required for an economics class in which I've ever skipped over big chunks of pages and not missed anything even vaguely important) came during almost 50 pages devoted to a sort of clumsy literary foreplay, which hopes to build up to then reveal the shattering secret you already know because you read it on the back cover. It's not the story here which grabs your attention but the author's appalling assumption that a sane reader would be charmed by the patently weak and stupid heroine, Ally, described in these pages and her sly, viciously manipulative guardians.
There is nothing even remotely acceptable about characters who carry out a plot to force a supposely educated and spirited girl into an arranged marriage by announcing to all the guests and journalists attending her birthday ball that she is engaged to a man she has never met and her guardians never found the time to tell her about before that moment because they were using that time to inform everyone else she's ever cared for about the bargain struck when she was a child so the guests could bring engagement presents to the elaborate bash the guardians had time to arrange because they were not talking to her. Even more inexplicable and annoying is how Ally seems to slip into a coma every time she's slammed over the head with another cloyingly coy hint about how this night will be a night above all other nights for her. Sensible readers will ache to slap her, hoping she would come out of her daze and, in turn, slap the self-gratified smugness off the face of the next person who refuses to explain why she's being dressed up like some Princess Barbie Turns 21 doll and why everyone is, despite her age, treating her as if she were a mentally impaired 6-year old.
There's no good answer to those questions, so on page 89 you should be reading about how Ally spits in the faces of these selfish, delusional, manipulative, creeps masquerading as her loved ones as she heads out the door and into her writing career. But no, Airhead Ally just sort of stands there; you can just imagine her weaving her head from side to side, saying, "Well, you know, like, yeah, whatever. It's, like, totally cool for you to demonstrate, like, your love for me by, like, ya know, denying my worth as a human being by, like, letting like 300 people know that I so have no choice about the guy who's gonna have, like, - gross, eewwwww! - sex with me, ya know, the rest of my life and you guys, like, soooo totally don't care."
By the time Airlhead Ally allegedly evolves into a vertebrate some 150 pages later, you know you're no longer reading the same book about the same people. The guardians and aunts - people we'd read about and mistakenly come to love and admire in 3 of Drake's other books - have taken off their masks and shown themselves as the most ill-informed tyrants, incapable of recognizing that a match is not made in heaven just because the male is handsome and titled. There is no explanation, then, other than poor editing, for her guardans' fluttering attempts to trick Ally into being introduced to her betrothed the day after their engagement party which he didn't attend. Huh? One day they unilaterally dictate that she will marry this stranger (who did have a good excuse for not being at the party), the next they decree that she will love him of her own free will. Since none of them accept that she has a choice in the matter, why do her guardians care how she feels? Over a quarter of the book is dedicated to showing that Ally has no value in their eyes and not much in her own - the reader's willful suspension of disbelief is, then, woefully overburdened by the time Journalist Barbie, er...Ally, agrees to try to consider her fiance handsome and fights for her right to get published anonymously.
The mystery ostensibly driving the plot is actually quite clever, but totally swallowed up by one-dimensional but obviously contemptible main characters, a weak and uninflected story line (he is this and she is that and they are this thensomething happened. The end.) - and limp editing (the main characters all suffer from multiple personality disorder, and Queen Victoria, is addressed as "Your Highness" instead of "Your Majesty" or "Ma'am").
Drake is too good a writer to produce this sophomoric drivel.