cimorene | Scott's The Abbot

I know teenagers in reality are often foolish and prone to risky behavior and refusing to pay attention to guidance or instructions, but having always been extraordinarily cautious and timid, it's a quality I can't relate to and have difficulty even empathizing with.

Even a character who, like The Abbot's Roland Graeme, is 100% plausibly foolish, impulsive, violent, arrogant and daredevil — being 17 and spoiled by a horribly abusive combination of parental indulgence and neglect — is very difficult for me to read.

My patience with foolhardy risk-taking in narrative is very short before I start saying constantly, "This guy should have Darwin Awarded himself to death by now. Please let this one kill him. And on the plus side, if he died this time, I wouldn't have to read about any more of his infuriating decisions."

So the bad parenting retiring from the foreground has not made the book much more palatable so far.