REVIEW: The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Sara Collins)
Author: Sara Collins
My rating: 4/5
Premise: 1826. Crowds gather to watch as Frannie Langton, maid to Mr and Mrs Benham, goes trial for their murder. For the first time Frannie must tell her story. It begins with a girl learning to read on a plantation in Jamaica and it ends in a grand house in London where a beautiful woman waits to be freed. But through her fevered confessions, one question haunts Frannie Langton: could she have murdered the only person she ever loved?
As you can tell from the premise, this book has a touch of Alias Grace about it. But what I loved about this book was the darkness of parts of the story and how controversial the main protagonist's life was. At first, I found the pace a tad slow. But once the setting shifted to London, I found the pace seemed to speed up, sometimes very quickly! The love affair with Mrs Benham seemed to jump from 0-100 quite quickly and then the whole section in the School House was not what I was expecting! 😂 You got a real feel of how trapped Frannie is in her life (in fact, all the women seemed trapped by life!) and I liked that the book didn't gloss over any grit, really portraying the prejudices of the 19th century. Overall, a good book with lots to think about!