FM’s
ratings:
- Premise 5
- Prose 5
- Plot 7
- Characters 7
- Overall 6
Comments
(optional
- but try to keep it under 3000 words!)
At
first, this novel was in danger of a much lower rating. The
stereotype of a "Cozy Mystery" of being way too
girly-chatty and filled with uninteresting details was in full swing
for much of the first quarter to a third of the book. The
descriptions of Christmas decorations and Christmas wardrobe and
Christmas food [yes, with recipes at the end of the book] was rather
over the top and bogged things down considerably. Okay, so it IS a
Christmas-themed novel and we can presume that many would read it
with the expectation of such detail. But the actual plot points could
have been presented in a President's Day novel or a Grandparents Day
novel just as well. The cast was virtually all grandmothers with the
occasional grandfather thrown in. And maybe that was the target
demographic for this book. The author seemed to snap out of it to
some extent as the end approached, and gave us a fairly decent
clue-oriented mystery; just much too late. I will presume that some
of Ballard's other works would score a 7 or even an 8 on my personal
scale. But - with apologies - I will probably never find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment