I was attracted to this book primarily due to the cover. To me, it harkened back a few decades to a different style of historical fiction, where splendid dialogue swept you along far more than any contrived historical action. Unfortunately, this was a case of "don't judge a book by its cover."

The novel starts abruptly, with no clear indication of the characters, the setting, or the circumstances around which the first act are set. In some cases, this can skillfully build suspense and mystery. This is not the case in "Mary Florida". It is difficult throughout to fully understand what is going on, though some parts are better than others. Characters are introduced without preamble or they are given far too much detail which muddies the characterization. Different locations are jumped to suddenly and not always with context. This works in film, jump cuts, but is far less effective in narrative form. It just lead to a general sense of confusion throughout.

My other major grievance was that the book was not well written in general. Sentences and paragraphs were written choppily without enough variety in sentence-length. There were a few issues of grammatical errors (though easily cleared up in editing). Most distractingly in my opinion was the writing style. It was overly descriptive of almost everything, but not very often in a flattering way. The major exception was for the title character of Mary. It was difficult to make my way though this book due to the over-abundance of meaningless descriptions. It did not create an atmosphere or lend itself to an easily followable narrative flow.

However, despite all my critiques there were a few things I liked. Some of the dialogue really was written nicely, in that flowy way that emulated classic novels. Other than at the very beginning, the historical setting seemed to be well-done, Overall, this novel disappointed me, and I think it requires some more work. The underlying plot is not bad, but I don't feel like it was represented well and I had a hard time getting through the book.