Instruct: Classify a given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Annoying

The book opens well, but quickly falters. The heroine, at 24, still acts like a teenager for the first 1/3 of the book. Then the villaness arrives, and Emily becomes a self-esteem basket case. Jacob is, at best, a mediocre hero. He's blind (figuratively), obstinate, and a taker. Lane makes the mistake of telling us what the characters are like rather than revealing them by their words and actions. The latter rarely match her descriptions. Some might say that her characters are flawed, but I found them unsavory (except Richard and Sophie). Yes, a good villaness, but it's hard to believe she got away with all she did. So often, I just couldn't believe that things happened as they did, or that so many characters were so clueless -- and repeated the same mistakes so often. Lane even threw in extraneous obstacles that had no basis in the story. One at the end, in particular, is suddenly held up -- out of nowhere -- as a possible reason for Emily to refuse Jacob. Bizarre.