BossyFatBabe

This series is so good and the narrator is great

Revisado: 10-23-24

Phil never follows the tropes I expect and I keep being surprised over and over. His characters are really well drawn and feel alive, and the plot answers questions but has me asking more and more. Can’t wait to read the next one!

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Pleasantly surprised!

Revisado: 09-29-24

I listen to a lot of cozy mystery/romance but this is much better written than most. The two characters have actual chemistry and when problems spring up between the two, they don’t feel contrived and manufactured, they feel completely relevant to the plot. I really like the authors way of describing how difficult it is to share a chat with people that you are starting to relate to less and less, something very poignant about that. The way that the ghosts play into the story is fun, and it feels like there’s a lot of potential for some of the side characters to get their own books. I thought the dialogue was very believable and while I did figure out the mystery itself pretty early on it didn’t annoy me as much as it can sometimes that the main character hadn’t put it together yet. The way a particular antagonist is done away with made me LOL.

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Light fun with some glaring issues

Revisado: 08-13-24

These books have been mostly fun and lighthearted and while I can usually tell who the murderer will be before the murder is even committed, I like the characters and dialogue enough that it doesn’t often bother me. But I’m starting to really lose my patience with how foolish the main character tends to be over and over again, and there’s a book in this batch that had a plot line which I thought was handled REALLY badly.

SPOILERS BELOW:
Mel recounts getting roofied and almost raped at a party, and her thoughts are full of self-blame, self-loathing, and shame. I could understand if this was a character choice that the author didn’t actually endorse IF someone contradicted her, and maybe eventually she voices those thoughts and they will! But for now it came across as really victim blamey, and her thinking how Joe may not want to marry “the type of girl who would let herself get into a situation like that” was really awful to read.

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Interesting story, needs editing

Revisado: 03-18-22

I’ve been enjoying the twists and turns of the story and getting to see more of the powers that are possible for people in this universe. The pacing feels extremely slow to me though, and I find myself frustrated as I listen to characters having what feels like the same conversations/revelations/fights over and over. Worse, I keep being taken out of the moment when I come across such poorly constructed sentences that I’m shocked an editor didn’t catch them. For instance, “Their faces were obscured by crystal masks that covered half their faces”, or “They were finally able to rest upon discovering a small island for them to rest upon.” There are LOTS of sentences like this, with exact wording repeated at the start and end, and this coupled with repetitive conversations can make a reader/listener feel like they’re walking in place instead of moving forward. I like the universe and the concepts, but I wish things had been tightened up. I also must confess that none of the characters really connects with me in a way that gets me actively rooting for them in particular, though that may be a symptom of the excessive formality in most of the interactions. I feel like the bones of this book are good, but it needed more work to be really gripping and streamlined.

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So much potential

Revisado: 11-13-21

In theory, this plot sounds like SO much fun. A librarian working in a quaint old library with a ghost! A murder happening in public right in front of her! But unfortunately the writing just doesn’t make it come alive. And that’s not only because I figured out who the murderer was really quickly, because I’ve read plenty of mysteries where I knew who it was and still really enjoyed the experience of reading the rest of the story. To me the clues were so clearly telegraphed that the fact Carrie wasn’t picking up on them made her look like a moron.

The main writing issue I have is with the tell-don’t-show approach to everything. We watch a scene unfold, and then afterward two characters practically repeat exactly what just happened in a discussion. This happens numerous times, but the example that leaps to mind is after seeing a cat get welcomed by some children, which gives Carrie an idea and she wins over her boss. After this she’s talking to a friend and says something like “I saw how good he was with the children and how much they loved him, and I thought the idea might work!” No shit, Carrie. We just saw that happen. This occurs so repeatedly that I think if all instances were removed, the book would lose about 1/3 of its length. Later she’s going out with a couple people, and beforehand there’s a conversation between her and Jill, where they wonder what this woman ACTUALLY wants, and Jill theorizes she either wants to ingratiate herself or maybe get information…after the get-together, they talk again and Carrie almost verbatim repeats the theories that Jill had stated mere pages earlier. Does the author just not trust that we can keep up?

The dialogue feels extremely stilted and formal a lot of the time due to them constantly re-explaining things to one another, so none of the characters seem like real people. Thus, the alleged chemistry the protagonist feels towards one dude is virtually non-existent to me, and in fact I doubted that he was even interested in her. At one point he abruptly turns the car radio on almost mid-sentence during a conversation, which is clearly a contrivance to keep him from hearing what Carrie just said. It feels silly and transparent as a writing device, not to mention extremely rude in the moment.

To top things off, at the end when she finally catches up to the readers and figures out who the murderer is, does she TELL anyone? No. She keeps insisting she will explain once they get to the car, and once they get there just talks about another earlier plot point entirely instead of blurting out “IT WAS THE BUTLER AND I JUST FOUND THE PROOF” like any actual human being would do. It’s deeply frustrating and inexplicable to read, makes her seem like an illogical weirdo, and drains the tension from the scene completely. The disappointment reaches a crescendo with her being rescued like a distressed damsel.

Overall I was bored, frustrated, and bewildered by some of the choices this author made, and wouldn’t recommend this one at all.

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Missing some elements for me

Revisado: 10-22-21

I may be alone in this, but after listening to the first two books I thought that we were going to eventually get to a point where we were learning more about the main character. For example, what’s the deal with her parents? What motivated her to start this business? She mentions deciding that Boise was the right city, but we don’t get any details about how she came to that decision. Does she have any friends of any kind that aren’t people she met in the first book? Unfortunately she seems to have no real backstory at all, and thus feels really shallow to me as a character. Perhaps that’s coming in the next book now that the fudge has been tracked down, but it seems odd to wait this long to flesh out your main protagonist.

Also, despite the fact that the murders have all centered around her accidentally enchanted candy, we spend almost no time in her shop at all and never once actually see her producing candy or doing anything creative. I think we’ve only been inside the actual shop, as readers, right before she gets arrested in the first book and for a few minutes when she’s training Sabrina, and I *think* at the end of this one when talking to her cousin. We hear that it’s a Halloween-themed candy store, and supposedly in this book Halloween is right around the corner, but we still get no details about what the place looks like, what kinds of candy she’s offering, how she makes them…idk. I often listen to these kinds of stories for the coziness of imagining having a lovely little creative and delicious business. Maybe that’s just me. But because we don’t see any of that, her complaints about just wanting to get back to making candy and not deal with murders anymore fall rather flat, because this is all we’ve ever seen her do. There’s no real sense of a routine being disrupted or any indication of a life before all this started happening to her.

The mystery in this one was a nice inversion of expectation, and the solution they come up with is creative and interesting. But I really have a hard time connecting with Lina or getting invested in her when she feels so flimsy to me.

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Fun and light, like candy

Revisado: 10-07-21

I was looking for something to listen to over the Halloween season and after listening to a few samples I preferred this narrator to the others. The story itself is straightforward, with characters that I found promising. There’s a lot of potential with all of them, and I plan on listening to other books to find out what she decides to do with them. The mystery was a little bit abrupt, and I found myself wishing there was more of a twist because they figure out who the murderer is sort of by accident and fairly early. I was sort of hoping they would turn out to be wrong at the last second but no dice. I like the way the author is handling magic and its uses and limitations, and look forward to seeing more development on that as Lina learns to use her powers. I did find some of the phrasing and internal monologue kind of repetitive, and I wish we got to know Lina a little more (where and how she lives, her training for making candy, maybe watching her make it) just for the comfort aspect…but I understand how dropping us into the middle of the arrest felt like a more compelling start to the story. Overall I enjoyed this and found Lina to be interesting because on the edge of death, she thinks about her business instead of loved ones, and wonders what that says about her, which as a small business owner without much close family I could uncomfortably relate to. So many leading lady characters are overly selfless and nurturing and have these loving family and friend relationships to prove they’re “good-hearted people” and it’s fun to see something different being done here.

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I wanted to like this so much.

Revisado: 06-23-20

As a big fan of 1920 murders mysteries, this should be right up my alley. However, I found the main character Eleanor really really frustrating, to the point that sometimes the second-hand embarrassment I experienced while listening was so intense that I had to turn it off. It’s one thing to be take charge and direct, it’s another thing to be childishly impulsive with no plan and just a lot of unfounded smack talk. Illinois did not feel at all like a grown woman who had experienced a lot in her life, she felt like a clueless teenager trying to pretend she was an adult

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Possibly one of the most boring books I’ve ever “read”

Revisado: 08-23-18

This book does not need to be 24 hours long. It blows my mind how little happened considering how long it took to get through the book. I found the tone of the narrator, which I think is meant to be soothing, affected and irritating. It’s sort of ironic that I liked her voice better when she was imitating accents for other characters, which I will admit she did very well. Overall the main characters are really boring and frustrating. Matthew is a domineering control freak with a patronizing attitude towards everybody which for some reason all the characters seem to defer to. Diana is told that she’s brave and strong and formidable, when in fact she faints (or grows faint) over NOTHING, can’t seem to do anything without Matthew’s guidance, and has no actual control over her powers. This lack of control keeps her turning to Matthew, who is constantly saving the day on her behalf. He falls immediately in love with her for reasons I cannot fathom, because she seems incredibly uninteresting. And considering what a problem she has with the fact that he keeps secrets and bosses her around and doesn’t let anyone in on his plans, I don’t understand what there is left to like about him since it seems to be the bulk of his entire personality. This book was tedious, frustrating, and I found myself rolling my eyes at Diana and her terrible decisions and responses to things. Absolutely do not recommend.

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This isn’t saying anything new

Revisado: 06-03-17

Hey, in case you haven’t seen a million zombie movies or shows, or if you haven’t read any post-apocalyptic books, maybe you need reminding that a loss of societal norms means that man will descend into chaos and give into his darker impulses of Only The Strong survive.

Or maybe you don’t.

This book has a POV from a person with the capability to help people WAY more than she does, yet we still have to sit through gratuitous rape scenes before she gets her ass moving to do shit. It was endlessly frustrating and rather than rooting for her I wanted to slap and shake her. At this point, I’m so bored by stories that only seem to want to point out how humanity is mostly garbage, and the characters in this that we are supposed to believe are good people don’t feel real at all. I found everyone to be flat and dull and they all spoke in the same kind of unbelievable way, agreeing immediately to start calling one another by names like “The girl with the dark glasses” instead of, you know, THEIR ACTUAL NAMES. I think the author was trying to make some kind of profound statement by saying names no longer matter if you can’t see the people those names belong to, but that’s such nonsense it made me want to scream.

I do not know why people love this book. It was tedious, repetitive, didn’t make me care about the characters, didn’t say anything new or make me think about things in a different way. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.

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