The Darlings of the Asylum

Women's psychological healthcare in the Victorian era is rightly derided these days, and the Darlings of the Asylum takes aim at this rather open door. The problem here is that the male characters are painted in an almost cartoon villain light. This just plays really weirdly to me as I read it. The very insidiousness of the treatment of psychological health craves for a degree of subtlety which is just lacking.

On the plus side the prose was pleasantly readable, I breezed through the book rapidly. The main character is sympathetic and even if the twist was somewhat telegraphed it was handled well enough.

This topic has been covered better by other authors - the lack of subtlety really detracts from the story unfortunately. Not terrible, but it doesn't quite live up to the premise