Reading Robyn

I was caught a little off guard by this Fashionista, but not in a good way. Saying this was okay is about a positive as I can get. Its negatives more then outweighed its positives and left me unsatisfied for such a promising concept.To start with, a third person narrative is a difficult sell for most readers, but when done right it can work wonders. However, in terms of a character driven story with a lot of emoting, the third person felt out of place. It didn't add anything to the storytelling and was choppy to read at various points throughout the book. Sometimes it worked, but when it didn't it left me feeling disconnected.My next big problem was the pacing of the plot. It was slower then I would have ever expected for a story about time travel. Act one is a lot of build up and back story, but I expected things to pick up once the time travel came into play. Once that happens though, it's followed by a lot of meaningless events, meaningless conversation, and meaningless characters, which quickly grew tiring. The event that should have brought the biggest jolt of energy was more or less a let down. And this is where the pacing got really wonky, once the third act hits everything started happening all at once. It was unbalanced, and although I appreciate that things had finally picked up, it left the book feeling very back heavy. By this point it had already lost me and what I got as reward didn't seem worth it.Another negative was, unfortunately, the main character. Louise is twelve years old with a school dance right around the corner. In her search for the perfect vintage dress she gets a mysterious invite to a vintage sale which ends up being more exciting then she could have ever expected. Louise is a good character, but I just couldn't connect to her voice. I didn't feel invested in her, and she didn't give me a lot to work with. I had to keep reminding myself that she was only twelve but her silly worries about being discovered and flip-floppy thoughts about having traveled through time were just uninteresting. Not necessarily bad by any means, but just very uninteresting for me to read about. This leads into my final complaint which was the surprise I got when I discovered for myself that this is in fact middle grade fiction. I don't care what anyone says, library shelvers included, this is the type of story I can see greatly appealing to a younger audience then the older set I think of when it comes to Young Adult. The tone of the story and the reading level skew younger then I was expecting and that effected my reading. Had I known going into this that it was aimed towards a lower age range then myself I could have deduced that I might not find this comparable with the books that I am currently loving. That could have been a red flag that I would've appreciated. Despite all of that, there were some redeeming qualities. The book is beautifully printed with some wonderful full colour pages. Along with these there are also excellent full page colour drawings of each outfit, and there are a lot of pretty outfits. Both of these elements were very well done and gave a lot of life to the book itself.With all of that said, I won't be reading the upcoming sequel The Time-Traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antoinette but I can see this being a series that a younger girl who is into fashion would just love to pieces. The vocabulary is light and easy to read, with a protagonist that can only grow as the series progresses. This was just so clearly not my thing but with a cover so pretty and concept so intriguing it was hard to pass up. Overall, It wasn't bad but by my standards it wasn't good, just okay. Maybe with all my complaints it's on the lower end of okay, but still okay.