Review: Who?

Who? by Elizabeth Kent
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Melodramatic. Everyone (but especially the women) is extremely emotional and makes bad decisions. It has what I would describe as a poor grasp of mental health: a woman who, it is emphasized by her doctor, is not insane, is nevertheless so mentally delicate that he declares that upsetting her emotionally could kill her. Someone has a stroke, and instead of making it difficult for her to walk or talk, it makes her childlike. The alcoholic, however, is believable: according to her, nothing is her fault, and every bad decision she ever made was fully justified and caused by someone else's actions.

Parts of it are predictable (I spotted who the young Frenchman was instantly), and it would be more so except that the characters behave erratically; there's a last-minute complete 180 that doesn't at all ring true to everything the character said and did in the immediately preceding chapters, for example, which shows unmistakable signs of only happening because the author needed it to work that way for the plot to come out right.

It also shows a poor grasp of writing mechanics for the time. These days, I often see people putting extra commas in lists of adjectives that don't belong there - particularly before a colour, which is this author's abiding fault - and before the main verb of a sentence, and leaving question marks out of sentences phrased as questions, but it was less common in books published a century ago, when editors mostly weeded out these issues even if the authors didn't (and the authors usually did).

I've given it my "thin-romance" tag as well, which I give to any story where a supposed great and abiding love arises instantly because someone is physically attractive, and without the characters subsequently spending much time together or having any real chance to get to know each other, becomes the basis for a lifelong commitment. It's borderline, in this case; her love for him, based on his actions in rescuing her, is more believable, though still a bit thin, but his love for her didn't seem to me to be well-founded at all, particularly since he spends much of the book not sure who the object of his affections actually is - hence the title.

At least the title does include the question mark.

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