The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

I thought this book would be a bit more captivating, but I really struggled to finish the book. It left more questions unanswered, and nothing really seemed to be resolved except the children finding suitable partners (which for some books is wonderful, but for this one, I expected and hoped for a lot more than what I got. The characters are all too "mysterious" to empathize with; they don't allow the reader in and tended to just leave me confused and alone all through the book. When they bring in survivors from a train wreck, I thought for sure the story would start to get more interesting, but I was wrong, so wrong. The family was too selfish to help the survivors because the mother was too uptight and worried about class and her image to lower herself to feed the poor people. Maybe the point of this book was class and the struggles between the classes, but if so, that theme was poorly portrayed and didn't seem to say anything about it by the end. The survivors didn't really survive, as we see in the end, and I'm not sure what role they played in the story at all. They could have been completely left out, and the story would have remained the same. The youngest child goes through the Great Undertaking, which again, I thought would be super exciting and bring some thrill to the book, and again, I was wrong. It made me laugh a bit, but it did not drive the plot at all. Overall I was fully unsatisfied with the story and did not find any reason to finish it although I did. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you want a dry tale of nothing.