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The '6 Hows' that are currently on my mind...

-How can you have such an amazingly beautiful cover for such a lifeless book?
-How can you write three stories at the same time and make them all boring?
-How many times have I skipped a few pages ahead without the story moving even an inch ahead? It's like - you read those 2 pages or you don't - the same thing, nothing happened anyway.
-How can you take such a good idea and do absolutely nothing interesting with it?
-How, Sarah Penner - HOW?

Not to mention that around the first 100 pages, the current-day story spoils the other two stories, by telling us roughly what will happen. So you sit there, with no mystery left and contemplate putting the book down. But you keep picking it back up, because surely, there must be some action coming, a plot or something - this whole circling around must lead to something....

Yet it doesn't. And I'm disappointed.

The three stories in a nutshell -
Story 1 - A lady goes to London from the US. Let's call her Lady One (even though I've just put the book down, I've already forgotten her name).In other circumstances you would say - oh, something magical will happen to her - but since there is zero magic in this book, all that she does is driven by a delusional air. I think that's one of my problems with her story. The writer makes sure to keep everything as close to reality as she can, yet puts the characters in impossible scenarios, which feel far-fetched for reality.
Because in reality, this lady would have been stabbed in London. Or in a better book, she would have stumbled upon an actual mystery.
Or heck - let's keep it close to reality, where she's murdered in London (because that's what happens when you walk the streets alone and climb into abandoned buildings) and the new friend or husband has to find the killer. Boom, a better story.

Story 2 - An older woman has an apothecary. The tonality of her chapters are so depressing that she feels like a page-filler. How on earth is she the most boring and most obnoxious of all 3, I can't understand. Surely, if you would get one story right - this should be the one. I was dreading reading every time it was her turn.

Story 3 - About a girl who follows the older woman around. Personally, there was no need for two storytellers to tell the same tale. The girl's perspective is definitely more fun and light-hearted, so if you take her away, you are left with nothing at all. And because the story duplicates, we get a retelling of the same thing twice. And while you think, but surely her perspective adds something to the storyline - prepare to be disappointed.
There was no need for her at all - one of these stories should have been cut. But if you cut the girl's story, you are left with the older woman's boringness and if you cut the older woman's story, you got no apothecary perspective and that's bad, because that's the freaking title..... It's a vicious circle this one.....

Here is my theory. The author had a great idea for a book. She imagined a great setting for the great idea. She imagined characters, but had no story to tell - so here we have it folks.
Don't judge a book by its cover I guess..........

It gets 2 start purely because I will only give 1 star to the books I am unable, ney, unwilling to finish.