review: more than you know by penny vincenzi

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More Than You Know is about Eliza, Eliza’s brother Charles, Charles’s acquaintance from National Service Matt, and Matt’s sister Scarlett along with all their various family, friends, lovers, and coworkers.  Yes, there really are that many characters (the hardcover version has a cast of characters of nearly three pages at the front of the book) in a novel primarily about Eliza.  Much of the 585 pages could have been cut if the focus had stayed on Eliza who was my only real interest anyway.  Her story of going against familial and societal expectations by embarking on a career and marrying a man not of her social class was far more interesting than the many tangents about the lives of Charles and Scarlett.  Those subplots had no bearing on the main plot.  Due to all these expendable characters and Penny Vincenzi’s frequent use of pronouns, the story could sometimes be hard to follow, especially since I was listening to the audio version.

About the narrator:  The fact that Rosalyn Landor is British (like most of the characters) really set the scene.  She also made it easy to tell if the speaker was male or female, but it was difficult to tell which male and which female at times.

4/5

Review copy provided by AudioGO.