Moll Flanders is beautiful. She is also dirt poor in the squalid, miserable streets of 1700s London. With no family and no options, Moll pulls herself up by her bootstraps and takes on the hazardous, uphill climb to a place of financial stability, but every time it seems as though she has reached the summit and things finally start to look good for her, something knocks her back to the bottom again. "Moll Flanders" tells the story of our plucky little heroine as she attempts to make an advantageous match (or five), falls into a life of crime, and eventually cleans up her act. This novel takes the scrappy, dirty little nobodies that sit in the periphery of other novels and places them center stage in the form of a tough, adaptable, and ambitious titular character.

Moll Flanders is a fascinating character. On the surface, she presents herself to the world as modest, honest, and virtuous, but underneath it all she is the farthest thing from it. For most of the novel, Moll is an unrepentant liar. She seamlessly flows from con to con, manipulation to manipulation, and secures herself a rather cushy life through doing so. Even her name is a lie, an alias made up to shelter herself from the consequences of her deceit. Despite all of that, though, she is a sympathetic character. We understand why she does what she does, even when she doesn't need to do it.

As I read, I couldn't make up my mind if Moll was the luckiest person in the world, or the least. On one hand, she finds people nearly everywhere she goes that are willing to help her out. On the other, she is constantly getting knocked down by dying husbands, unexpected losses, and unplanned pregnancies. All throughout the novel she yo-yos from happiness to misery and back again. Her life is chaos, and the only tools she has to create some semblance of stability are her looks, her charisma, and her wit. In the beginning, she relies mostly on her looks and charisma, wooing, seducing, and outright manipulating men into providing for her. As she grows older, and her looks begin to fade, she is forced to instead rely on her wit and charisma, devising means of stealing what she can't earn and talking her way out of trouble.

Moll's story is a genuinely good one, but writing from the 1700s is an acquired taste. If you aren't used to reading classics, the massive difference between what constitutes a good book now and what constituted a good book back then might be a little jarring. There is very little poetry in the work of Daniel Defoe. The facts are presented in a straight forward way, and there is very little in the way of description and atmosphere. I don't recall even one paragraph that described what Moll looked like, other than to be pretty, and certainly nothing of the other characters. Many of the characters don't even have names, described only by their roles in Moll's life. The story, while a worthwhile one, reads as "this happened, then this happened, then this happened," without much focus on thoughts or feelings or descriptions. It can be tedious, especially toward the end when the action has slowed to a crawl and Moll's only further adventure is to wrap things up.

At the end of the day, "Moll Flanders" is worth the read. It provides a unique insight into the desperation of poverty in 18th century Britain, and showcases one of the most unique and memorable heroines of classic literature. With five husbands, a handful of lovers, and an astounding NINE!!! children, I imagine a modern day Moll Flanders as your tattooed, blue haired grandmother who shares her pot with you and is always telling you inappropriate stories about guys she hooked up with in the 60s. In fact, I would love to see a modern day adaptation of "Moll Flanders" that amounts to just that!