 Hey guys, it's Liana and I'm here today to rant about The Vanished Bride. I'm gonna figure why I say I'm gonna review it or talk about it. We all have seen the thumbnail. We know what I'm here to do and that is rant about a terrible terrible book. But there is something I'm excited about so real quick. I've mentioned before on this channel that I like Bones Coffee a lot and they do do seasonal flavors but last year they did an Octoberfest flavor called Wonder Bones that's salted pretzel flavor and I didn't realize for some reason that it would be seasonal. I thought it was just like a new addition to their lineup and I loved it. My favorite flavor and then it went away because that's it and I have been hoarding with my like last of it all year and I kept waiting in September for them to announce that it would be back so I could stock up and September past and then we were in October and they still didn't announce it and I was like I guess that's it no more Wonder Bones no more and the day that I like declared that I had given up hope and I had already ordered more coffee because I wasn't going to wait any more for it to be back. This is a really long story and it's not what you're here for but I'm really excited about it so the back is the point of the story. Wonder Bones is back. I ordered like 10 bags because I'm extra. It's not for everyone this flavor but I like it so I'm not promoting them for any reason other than my own enthusiasm. They don't pay any shit so if you think salted pretzel coffee sounds delicious then don't make my mistake and order only like one bag. Order 10 anyway. Well that's also what I'm drinking right now. No one is surprised. All right but the thing you're here to hear about is The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis although from reading the dust jacket I don't think that's her real name. I think that's a pen name. I mean I would hide behind a pen name too if I wrote this atrocity. Yeah it's a she says it's a Bronte-esque pseudonym but her real name is Rowan Coleman. In what way is that a Bronte-esque pseudonym? Okay well whatever. If you follow me on Instagram you already kind of saw me rant about this so you're ready for this. If you follow me on Goodreads I already wrote a negative review on there so you already know what I have to say about this. Yeah you just get to see more of my face. The Vanished Bride the conceit of the story is that the Bronte sisters Emily Ann and Charlotte are lady detectives and solving a disappearance that's presumed to be a murder and it's not very long and it being like basically like fanfiction of real people which is I mean even when it's done well that's what this is. So I didn't expect great things from it. I didn't expect it to be like earth-shattering literature but I expected to have a good time. I expected it to be like dark and gothic mysterious interesting it's a who done it and I thought there'd be some fun homages to the Bronte's well to you know to the the books they wrote or things like that. Um this book was a mess was a mess. Oh my god it's like it's not even 300 pages and it took me over a week to read it. I forced myself to finish it so that I could film this rant for you. Can you say sacrifice? Also like low-key cover by like this just looked like a good october time read it looked victory well not victorian I guess is it victorian who was queen then well whatever but a gothic mystery type thing and it uh oh god it was so bad okay let's um I don't even know where to start well for one I'm gonna put it down because I just want to drink my coffee and I don't want to look at that book anymore. Okay so what made it so so bad other than everything let's see should I start with characters should I start with plot should I start with anachronism should I start with bad writing I don't know I wish I had a wheel to spin so I could decide because there's no really good entry point. Let's start with the plot. The plot is basically what I told you so the the three Bronte sisters um they read an article in the newspaper that like the idea of being a detective is for the first time like presented to them because there's some newspaper article about about a crime being investigated in a new way i.e. being investigated at all but like modern detecting and so from the phrase modern detecting they they come up with the term detector not detective so they call themselves detectors which is just so annoying and like at first I guess I was kind of cute because I was like yeah I mean if you've never heard detective you wouldn't naturally you wouldn't necessarily naturally go from detecting to detective detector would probably be a logical leap or like title for that but they said it a lot and considering they're not actually employed in any official way to do this they've just decided to be nosy it was a bit much to have them say that they are detectors they're detectors they're detectors I was like I can get it so yeah they read about I think that's just the greatest idea ever and then coincidentally a friend of theirs from school who was working as a governess nearby the the woman of the lady of the house the mother of the children she's governessing she vanishes and leaves a pool of blood in her room and it's like a big thing but the authorities don't seem terribly concerned about this and all suspicions are pointing to the nefarious and sinister seeming husband so the bronte sisters because of their friendship with the governess they have an in and also our board apparently and have nothing else to do but be nosy so they're going to solve this disappearance but they're doing it because feminism oh my god so so subtle is all of the soap boxing it's not a great mystery it's basically what i think when i was ranting about on instagram and compared it to a jukebox musical if you don't know what a jukebox musical is because i i forget in a previous context i also mentioned a jukebox musical and someone was like what's of that jukebox musicals i promise this is relevant are like mamma mia or rock of ages or i think there's one they did with queen music i think they did one for green day where basically you write a story around or across the universe the movie you write a story around the already existing music so that you like find a story in those lyrics a way to weave together multiple songs so that they seem to be telling a story you know in a like as as though a musical had been written and these songs were written for it so that's a jukebox musical rock of ages uses like just rock in general mamma mia and um some of the others they use like a specific artist and use songs that they wrote anyway that's relevant because this mystery was like a jukebox musical but for the bronte novels so the the mystery was just basically like it didn't actually make any sense in and of itself if you like really think about it even for longer than two seconds because all it really is is just an excuse to cram in as many like references and like inspiration for the bronte novels you have like the governess who's kind of got the hots for the man that she works for Jane Eyre you've got like uh sneak you've got like a dogs guarding a rich house and a girl being emily bronte sneaking into that house and seeing a man i guess this is kind of spoilery but you shouldn't read this books don't worry about it a man talking to a skull that he's dug up of his first wife so heath cliff and you have like even more spoilers now like uh an abused wife that's like fleeing her husband and training taking her children with her so the tenant of wildfell hall and so all these things are just like crammed together into one mystery story and it just like it doesn't work because you can't have the inspiration for mr rochester also be the inspiration for heath cliff and also be the inspiration for what's his name huntington from the tenant of wildfell hall because those are extremely different and distinct characters and they have varying degrees of villainy and like the way this is explained i don't want to say explained in a way but like where the reader could like buy into it i guess is like in what the girls are getting out of it if they make sense like their impression and interpretation of events not that they disagree on what has happened but they're sort of uh they're the lens through which they view people's motivations and this is another like to leap to characters now basically each of the bronte sisters in this book are a two-dimensional caricature where their their entire identity is boiled down to a single personality trait so you've got like the smart one the sensitive one the weird one and that's like their entire identity which is already bad writing anytime your characters are like that badly written but to take actual historical like real people like the bronte sisters who are famous for the depth of the characters that they've written for their ability to like delve into the psyches of humans and their motivations that's what makes those books stand the test of time regardless of whatever problematic issues they have that's why people still read them because the bronte's wrote characters with such nuance and depth and just the like insulting irony of having the characters of themselves be utterly lacking in depth and dimension is like good god i mean it's laughable and insulting and it's it's it's ridiculous again if they were entirely fictional characters they would be badly written characters but to do this to the bronte is like oh my god fuck you but yeah so the way that they each view this like the husband who's suspected of murdering his wife because you he has to be somehow the inspiration for rochester and heathcliff and huntington it's the weird times when they kind of feel sympathetic towards him versus not or the fact that it's it's like bashed over your head over and over how emily thinks to herself that love only leads to bad things that like love is dark love is bad love is depraved that it makes you do evil terrible things so to boil down and utterly simplify emily herself as well as the message of weathering heights is just that love is darkness love is bad and that's all you get out of emily her perspective her inspiration that's it is just that love leads to bad things love is never good and then over and over with an equal lack of nuance we get charlotte being the romantic one and her sister is making fun of her forward about how she always romanticizes things so of course she would see the romantic side of this guy being her mr rochester which doesn't work because again mr rochester is a complicated character and like there are definitely good reasons and arguments for why jane air shouldn't have fallen in love with him or shouldn't have been interested in him but there's still like there's arguments to be made there's depth to explore there's nuance there's no nuance here so it just makes charlotte look like an idiot and then like the comparison to tenant of well fell hall like plot wise is two on the nose the characters seem to be more of an inspiration for for heath cliff and rochester and not the plot so much the plot of the murder is the tenant of well fell hall like like pretty much like exactly which just i mean if you want to write a mystery that's mysterious like don't do that so we've bad plot bad characters but there's more the writing is also bad not that those other things don't mean bad writing but like just the from the pros perspective i mean do i want to start with that no i want to start with the feminism the anachronism so which does kind of tie into the bad pros i haven't super planned this out but these are kind of the points i touched on on goodreads and on instagram they would constantly stop the story and by they i guess i mean the author but when i said they i was thinking the bronte sisters but it wasn't them it was this author the bronte sisters have nothing to do with this mess the story would stop and it's not a long book it's less than 300 pages it would stop like every few pages for one of them to soapbox about feminism and the the lack of subtlety and the like repetition and the utter anachronism of it was painful it was painful and if this book like i don't know if it wasn't taking itself remotely seriously and the whole thing was just like an allegory for feminism it'd still be annoying i guess but it would be kind of better but it seems to want to be taken somewhat seriously as like a historical fiction mystery but the soapboxing about feminism literally all the time like anyone that will listen anytime like anytime anything ever comes up about what a woman could or could not do or about that it might be dangerous for one of them to go there by themselves as a like a single young woman without an escort every single time that happens and since they are lady detectors going into scary places scary places the opportunity for this to come up is frequent and so every single time that comes up they're like we have minds and we can protect ourselves and women are independent and we are intelligent it's just like oh my god i get it like for one i get it and for two no woman in that time period would have mouthed off to her father to her elder brother to a male authority figures in the town like this just simply would not happen it wouldn't it wouldn't and honestly like in the Bronte sisters novels themselves there is like again one of the reasons they stand the test of time is because in their own way they display an incredible level of feminism and independence of spirit for women of a time in a time period where that was not at all the norm and largely frowned upon they have their little moments of rebellion like Jane Eyre telling Mr Rochester that even though she's poor and plain and obscure that she has feelings that she has a soul and that like he shouldn't trample on her just because she's not you know a rich beautiful lady and the moment that that happens in Jane Eyre is a moment where it she has pushed been pushed to her breaking point and she's saying things that she really normally wouldn't say and she's saying them because she fully expects to lose her position she has nothing left to lose in terms of this relationship and and she just needs to say it and even then it's subtler she's not saying just because i'm a woman like she's pushed to her breaking point emotionally and is is willing to sacrifice her status and position and has already given it up for lost and is finally saying things that she normally wouldn't say the girls in this book literally all day every day and he drop of a hat they immediately launch into a diatribe on feminism and it's just so absurdly anachronistic and even if it was a modern day setting you just be like can you talk about something else like my god we fucking get it you're independent intelligent whatever even though you don't seem all that intelligent to me based on what i'm reading here and then combined with the constant like super modern feminism there's a lot of like weird turns of phrase that they would use that at times it was like this weird like heavy-handed attempt to sound old-timey where every sentence both in the like narration and in the dialogue was just crammed with like a bunch of unnecessary words because someone the author seems to have confused the more ornate way of writing from back in the day with just putting in extra words and certainly it was wordier back then like that's why dickens is so long and the bronte novels are long because people it was longer sentences people were more elaborate in their speech that is true but you don't just put more words in you don't just put in extra words that's not how that works but that's how this is written so it's really difficult to read like classics can be kind of difficult to read just because it is an older sort of pattern of writing pattern of speech and to sort of get used to that but this is unreadable because it's long but for no it's not like when you get a flow or you get a feel for it there's no feel to get because there's no actual reason for these sentences to be constructed this way other than the author thinks this makes it old tiny which it doesn't makes it bad so the the cramming in extra words to make it old-timey mixed with still modern terms of phrase so mixed into these extra long sentences would be really modern terms of phrase so it was just the most awful reading experience because it was faking old-timey mixing in modern and altogether just not remotely readable or well written because like if you wanted to write it with like a totally modern sounding narrator and totally modern sounding dialogue i wouldn't necessarily like hate it if it leaned into being really campy and not taking itself remotely seriously a la doctor who or my plane jane which is about jane air and charlotte bronte and the ghost busters and like it's full-on campy unapologetically so so when it goes off the rails and does things that are weirdly modern like it really doesn't matter because it's not really trying to be serious it's like you know it's just a good time this book like never leaned into being campy because it would so frequently yell at you about feminism and seem to want you to take that seriously and then try to be kind of actually suspenseful with its mystery that uh that these again these anachronisms were unforgivable because this isn't the kind of story where you can get away with it not the way that you've written it so just like fucking google this shit like or read a bronte book it's not that hard to discern the difference and if you can't do it like if you really can't tell what it is that makes old-timey writing different and you think it's just more words then i don't i don't know what to tell you don't be a writer also this is apparently not her debut apparently she's written many novels before is an acclaimed author of numerous novels like what novels god i hope they're not written like this just what a mess and the bronte's would you when they would make jokes they would phrase them in as more as many words as possible to make it old-timey but the core of the joke would be things like referencing the brain where they just like it wouldn't be in the common vernacular like there's a point where someone says that all of emily's gallivanting on the wars has turned her brain to mush but no they wouldn't have talked like that like this kind of in-depth knowledge of anatomy particularly to do with the brain in 1845 no she could have made a joke like this she could have had the character say something about how you know she's her mind is you know weakened by being in the moors or that you know she seems to be going mad or something like that i mean they were still using leeches back then like what don't her mind has turned to mush like please no sorry not even her mind her brain has turned to mush yeah that said multiple times there's other jokes like that that are just just bad because they don't sound the only thing old-timey about them is the extra words used to tell them oh my god it was so bad i didn't mark any pages or quotes because um i feel like any page i open up to would be bad because it was that bad all the time so i'm just going to open it to random page and see what i get maybe i can find a great quote to illustrate my point oh well i literally opened up to a page where it says i fear that may be because your brain has entirely vacated the premises of your head or died in situ one or the other like they just wouldn't fucking talk like that your brain has vacated the premises of your do you see what i mean where it's just like extra elaborate sentences with extra words to make it old-timey but none of that was actually what they would have said back then oh good god and then there's this there's like a some rock that emily found in the vanished brides like room and has decided this is an important clue and even though like no one thinks this is a thing like of course at the at the very end it's like is a thing and you're just like oh my god like it really wouldn't be but you made it a thing but uh so she's found like she's trying to find like a geologist to tell her about the rock which is like she wouldn't have thought of that back then like they detecting, detecting isn't a thing where you actually know how it's done so the notion that you'd find a rock and then talk to a geologist to try to find where it came from like i'm sorry but you just like no but anyway um she says thank you nevertheless john emily said now where might i find an expert to identify this stone i will have to write letters to academics i suppose which will take time i do not have not to mention that whenever a person addresses a single man in search of information they always suppose you are in want of a husband and really there is nothing that a person could want less she looked at john when i say a person i mean myself like dear god like so on the nose and the reference to a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife nonsense just and she's asking somebody to help her identify a rock but she found a way to shoehorn in feminism and then he instead of being like what the fuck are you on about woman um this person she's trying to dismiss emily john said wiping the building heat of the day off the back of his neck with a kerchief i cannot file them what you are talking about but i do believe there is no man alive whose interests you couldn't see off with your sharp tongue and fierce looks if the need arose dear lord in heaven they just wouldn't have bantered like this like just no he's saying like oh don't worry no man would want you like no no oh i forgot until literally the second there's even like a chosen one moment because of course they're going to go talk to some gypsies because weathering heights and they go and they like talk to these gypsies about do they know anything about the blood that was found and whatever and the the old crone gypsy lady is very ornery and not super wanting to help but she finally does but then she keeps referring to charlotte as like the the fey looking one or whatever and then she insists that charlotte come and sit next to and then charlotte's like i don't want my fortune told whatever she's like i'm not going to tell your fortune but like she hands her palm and she's like i'm not going to i don't need your palm like i can read it in your face and then out of nowhere this like a gypsy lady says something about how charlotte has this light inside of her and she's destined for great things if only she would realize it then that's never like nothing's done with that later like it's not a prophecy at least as far as i feel like the author wants to make this a series so maybe i'll come into it later but just a moment to all of a sudden just sit charlotte down and be like you are so amazing girl like you are so amazing i was like are we doing this is she a chosen one now what's happening why why oh and one last thing i wanted to mention is that in addition to the brandy sisters being like like two-dimensional caricatures they also bicker like they are extremely unlikable like they take every opportunity to be catty and to fight with each other over nothing and again it's extremely modern it's not subtle it's not the way that like it's kind of the way lydia is in front and prejudice but worse because it's also like they're serious and we're supposed to think of them as intelligent independent thinking women and lydia is like a joke and meant to be a joke which you know say what you will about that that's the intention there so to make these sisters bicker and and squabble like children like and minter mix that with their two-dimensional characters and the shoehorned in feminism and the modern expressions and the whole thing the whole thing is a mess it's a mess oh my god i just i can't i can't even like i expected to read this book and i never thought i would love it like i never thought it would be five stars and if it was great i would be delighted i just expected a fun time a gothic mystery i cannot like stress enough how much i fucking hate this book oh my god i was out loud while i was reading it there were some sentences where i was just like are you fucking kidding me oh my god oh my god so yeah don't read this book if you have read it let me know your thoughts in the comments down below and if you were planning to read it let me know if i've changed your mind i hope i did there's better books out there for you if you want to read an interesting gothic mystery that's related to the brontes read one of the books that the brontes wrote they're much better think that's all i have to say for today let me know all your thoughts in the comments down below i post videos on saturdays so like and subscribe and i'll see you next saturday bye