Don Quixote de la Mancha Book

'Queen of the Underworld' never pulls together, never condenses into a single focus. The book seems like a cross between a diary with pages torn out at the end and a coming-of-age story that loses that thread mid-way and meanders off in dead ends.

On top of those puzzling plot cutoffs, the author Gail Godwin inserted bizarre pointless Mitty-like imaginings of what might have happened to people that the main character Emma Gant indulges in, daydreams which I kept waiting for to have some kind of reason for being there but never did. Plus I began to dislike this young woman as the novel went on. Her ambition and overcoming childhood difficulties initially won me, but then she reveals herself to be an idiot 23 year old, whose ambition appears to swamp every part of her life. She also appears to be stuck in her thinking at ten years of age.

What is so sad is there was at least the beginning and middle of two or three great books here. The various plot threads of the Cuban revolution and refugees flooding Florida, the young college graduate with her new newspaper reporter job in 1959, the affair with a married Jewish hotel owner, the character Queen of the Underworld, who the reporter feels an affinity with (WHY???), the Cuban Mafia invading Florida - all excellent possible avenues for terrific novels but none of them followed up on to a conclusion in this book. If this was a first in a trilogy it was pretty awful as a lead-in. Why was this unfinished mess released?