The Life She Was Given

tl;dr: Decent, not great, not bad, like a 3.5 I'd say? I'll round it up to 4 because it's not a bad book. One of the book's viewpoints was way more interesting than the other, and you really need a high tolerance for drama and tragedy to get through the last half of the book.

General plot spoilers here:

So we have an albino girl, Lilly, born to an ultra-religious mom and a doormat dad. Ultra-religious mom interprets her albinism as a test from God and sent from the Devil both, so she gets locked in the attic and treated poorly. Eventually, at a young age, her mom drags her out of the house while her dad was away and sells her to a passing circus. Albinism being a novelty, she becomes part of the sideshow freak show, until she becomes old enough to leverage her skills and popularity into a better role. She meets Cole along the way, the two are first friends, then lovers, then married with a baby. Things go poorly for all involved.Julia's viewpoint from the future is also included, an estranged daughter from the same family that sold Lilly to the circus, she inherits the manor after being notified that ultra-religious mom was dead, and also inherits the mystery of who lived in the attic and why her late father has newspaper clippings from the circus. The story is told through a combination of these two viewpoints.

The writing was great, but I think story-wise I preferred Wiseman's The Orphan Collector to this one. The drama here feels incredibly forced and contrived, and I much preferred Lilly's viewpoint to Julia's. Julia felt like she existed as a plot vehicle, which is fine, but I feel like you're supposed to hide those better.

Character/Ending spoilers:

It's also hard to feel anything at all for Lilly's predicament when everyone around her seems to fight all her fights for her. She grows a backbone at the end, and then the end happens. What happened to Cole? No idea.

Still a decent book regardless. Lilly's time at the circus was really interesting to read about (good and bad), I just wish the ending had gone a different way. The tragedy train at the end was particularly unrelenting, and it felt like I was hopping from one bad thing to the next in rapid succession.