Kelly's Reviews > Framley Parsonage

Stream of consciousness late night baby feeding review 2022: (the series continues!)

While I continue to find Trollope’s authoritative authorial voice charming and soothing, I liked this one the least of the Barchester series so far. I think it’s due to three factors.

1- the pacing problems evident at the end of Doctor Thorne & Towers we’re even more pronounced here. For ex: The renewed bills that were renewed and then weren’t but then were went on for literally hundreds of pages and filled far too many of them, and had no suspense because we know it’s never gonna happen to the hero.
2- no one here makes me look forward to their plot reappearing. Even my fav Miss Dunstable was somehow more boring in this- tho I appreciated the time taken for her to get her HEA! I also hated the reappearance of a problem from Doctor Thorne which was that the romantic heroine- Lucy in this case, Mary in that- started off as awesome and witty and ironic and interesting, but then as soon as the lurrrrvvvee plot commenced she got all martyr-y and boring. Why did Trollope do this to his best ladies?!
3- the societal commentary was far less interesting here than in the first two. This felt like a a scold-y story about never maxing out your credit cards or forgetting that the house always wins at the casino. Like undoubtedly good life lessons but he also pulled his punches at the end so they didn’t land and again so much repeating himself.

This took me forever to listen to despite Timothy West’s excellent narration- I found myself listening to podcasts instead. I might take a break before book five/six so I can appreciate the end of the chronicles much more- pushing through four in a row may have been too much of a good thing!