At first I was really enveloped in this, but the author went off on tangents and rambled way too often and for way too long for me to stay as interested throughout the rest of the book. This did not have to be as long as it was, and it wouldn't have been if we weren't given pointless information for no reason other to make a one sentence comparison when the tangent was finished and we finally got back to the plot of the book. And I never want to see the word "lugubrious" again. I also only cared about three characters (Fantine, Jean Valjean, and Cosette). Every time we switched to someone else, I just wanted to get through it to go back to one of the three I actually cared about.