Persuasion - Jane Austen (C+)

Finding myself in need of a soporific, I began reading this book. It worked quite well. For the first quarter of the novel I found myself struggling to become interested, and reading effectively induced sleep. The consequence of that is that it took a while to complete such a short little book.

Once past the chapters that seemed to describe at length how Anne, the main character, was feeling in a particular moment, I found a story somewhere in the narrative, and then it became mildly interesting.

Is it even a spoiler to say that after indecision on both ends of a relationship, the girl ends up with the guy who she liked in the first place? This is Jane Austen after all...

I felt this book was somehow incomplete, as well as formulaic. The characters are a little annoying, and some of the events hard to follow, for example it there is an "accident" which when read seems to say that a girl has died, but then a few pages later she is not dead, and has only sustained a bump on the head. A pedigree is also necessary to understand who is related to whom.

The ending of the book is a "and they all live happily ever after ... except Anne's sister Elizabeth who ends up an old maid ... and the happily part only counts if Anne doesn't get richer than her sister Mary ... if Anne's husband goes to war that would suck too..." It is really quite a downer.