A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I really wanted to love A Curse as Dark as Gold. A historical fantasy set in a mill during the Industrial Revolution - what a perfect setting for a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin.
Unfortunately, it was really hard work to get through this and I skimmed a lot. The writing is tedious, the details of running the mill too thorough and dry. Plus, I was expecting something a bit more industrial out of the setting with a more Dickensian or Gaskellian feel - a mill in a place like Manchester, not in a superstitious village.
The story itself is extremely slow to take off. A hundred pages of mill management could have been chopped out easily. I didn't really like any of the characters either. Most of them remained fairytale remote the whole time. The ending was decent, at least, but a haunted mill with a generational curse should have been much more interesting.
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