Reviews Literature / ElsieDinsmore

Literature One of the Worst Books I've Ever Read

Ugh. This was just a hot mess all around. After reading about the boatloads of Values Dissonance and Unfortunate Implications it has, I decided to read the first book on Project Gutenberg to see if it was as bad as people said. My verdict? IT IS. Dear lord, this book is very, VERY flawed, and there's practically nothing salvageable about it. Here are the three biggest things about it that make me want to bang my head against the wall.

• The lack of plot and the MASSIVE amounts of overblown, saccharine melodrama. Dear lord, the melodrama in this series is enough to make stuff like Fifty Shades of Grey and Game of Thrones look cheerful. Since the plot for the first book is extremely thin, Finley compensates for this by having EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER treat even the most asinine of situations and misdemeanors with all the gravity of a genocide and foam at the mouth in doing so. Anything Elsie does gets her screamed at, told she's bad, or sent to her room, from going to the meadow for five minutes or crying. I am not exaggerating. There's trying to be dramatic, and then there's needlessly exaggerating every single conflict possible and making it into the biggest thing ever. The way this book goes about it is just painful to slog through, and it results in piss-poor writing as a whole.

• Every single character is annoying as hell. Elsie is a whiny, flawless Purity Sue with all the vertebrae of a dead jellyfish, her father Horace is a pathetic excuse of a parent who freaks out at Elsie over stupid things and is a massive idiot on top of it, Miss Day is yet another stereotypical Sadist Teacher who gets off on abusing Elsie for not being perfect by her standards, and the entire Dinsmore family are a bunch of uppity assholes with no depth to them. Every single character is so one-dimensional and poorly written, with no attempts at giving them any kind of nuance or depth. Most of them are there just to be mean to poor widdle woobie baby Elsie, with Horace being the worst of them. I wanted to kick him in the ballsack every time he opened his mouth.

• The preachy writing. Finley, we get it. You want to teach little girls to love God and be submissive and absolutely obedient to their elders and God and be little more than emotionless automatons. There's no need to use whole passages from the Bible and have Elsie preach your religious views in every single page. The book is little more than Finley's mouthpiece for her religious views, and any attempt at writing is painfully dull, favoring telling over showing. I don't think I need to say more about the "well-meaning" parenting or all of the Values Dissonance here, so I won't repeat myself.

This book is an insult to children and to religion as a whole, IMHO. I can recommend so many children's books that are far better. Bottom line, don't give this series the time of day. It's not worth it.

Literature I like it unironically, but you may not

I actually like these books. I can't defend the racism, sexism, or "well-meaning" parental abuse, but it does give an insight to how people thought and practiced their faith in the 1860's, when these books were first published. It does romanticize the US antebellum south, which I didn't know was a thing before "Gone With The Wind". Elsie does have a strong faith, but not much else aside from her looks, which is probably why Elsie remains popular with Christian audiences to this day. And these books did give steady work to Martha Finley, who continued to write this series until shortly before her death. Also, if you want to not have to read the slave accents or the horrors of abuse Elsie is put through, stick with the "Life of Faith" reprints instead of the public domain copies. They're fairly cheap from Amazon.