The Calamity Club

A hard book for me to rate, since I did not find it completely without merit. The early chapters were fun. I enjoyed both Meg and Birdie, and especially Birdie's interactions with her sister and Mrs. Tartt. I was really looking forward to the remainder of the book. And then... things went off the rails. The book is too darn long. There was a tremendous amount of filler. And when Birdie and Meg got to interact with new groups of people, the storylines kind of went alternatively nowhere and in too many places at once. The rest of the book gradually squandered the credit it got a the beginning.

I see a lot of reviewers upset by [spoilers removed] (although if you're spoiled by that, I have to ask what you thought was going on in the first scene), the [spoilers removed], but none of those bothered me at all. Bring it on. It was just the meaningless meanderings and the setting up of huge risks and plot directions (some within the last 40 pages) with absolutely no pay-off. My complaint is all about the writing (which, taken on a page-by-page basis is quite nice, although I thought Meg's inner voice was a little all over the place, and often too adult by half).