I've read some essays lately describing "readability" as a bad quality for literature. If that's true, then this book has a lot going for it. As in, long passages of questionable grammaticality and dubitable meaningfulness. The fact that it was written as a serial is painfully obvious, and half-way through you can scarcely believe how much soap-opera plot has happened already and what more could be ahead. And after suffering through to the end, we hardly know anything about Maisie at all: she's been nearly three-hundred pages of observing adults and having absolutely no interests or characteristics of her own.