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A review by dilliemillie
Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston
Did not finish book.
DNF at 61%. It's not a great sign if I have to repeatedly talk myself into listening to a book.
There are a lot of interesting elements here: magic, West African mythology, warrior women, a teenage theater kid finding friends, family dysfunction. If only the writing weren't so confusing! Jumping back and forth between past and future storylines would be fine if either storyline were easy to follow. Instead I struggled to understand what was actually happening in many of the scenes. The writing style causes a lot of dissonance when poetic description is sometimes something supernatural happening, but that isn't clear until several sentences later. The book is muddled, slow moving, and - as much as I hate to say it - more boring than it has any right to be. I honestly believed this book to be a self-published novel and possibly a debut, but it's neither. It also doesn't seem to have a clear target audience, with the sections about Cinnamon reading as young YA and the sections with the Wanderer very adult.
None of the characters felt very real or deep, and I didn't connect with any of them. I'm not going to touch the mod squad's best friendship beyond saying it comes out of nowhere and is hard to believe. But I do want to address the language around Cinnamon's brother, who is gay. He's gay. That's not a bad word, and it's also not a word used until over halfway through the book. That's not to say his sexuality is in question though; he is referred to - frequently - by a very different, hateful word. I'm not condemning the author's use of a slur to communicate the beliefs and attitude of a character, but I do have a problem with that slur accompanying nearly every reference to a particular character.
Listening to the story as an audiobook does nothing to help with the general comprehension problem. In fact, I think reading a physical copy might have been easier. Time jumps, chapter divisions, and scene changes have almost no delineation, leaving the listener playing catch up with the shifts while the story moves on without them. The narrator's cadence requires some initial adjustment, and while her voice fits Cinnamon it feels too young for the Wanderer. Early in the story there are also several hesitations before pronouncing unfamiliar words, which make the narrator sound unsure and inexperienced.
I wish I could have loved this book. Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.
There are a lot of interesting elements here: magic, West African mythology, warrior women, a teenage theater kid finding friends, family dysfunction. If only the writing weren't so confusing! Jumping back and forth between past and future storylines would be fine if either storyline were easy to follow. Instead I struggled to understand what was actually happening in many of the scenes. The writing style causes a lot of dissonance when poetic description is sometimes something supernatural happening, but that isn't clear until several sentences later. The book is muddled, slow moving, and - as much as I hate to say it - more boring than it has any right to be. I honestly believed this book to be a self-published novel and possibly a debut, but it's neither. It also doesn't seem to have a clear target audience, with the sections about Cinnamon reading as young YA and the sections with the Wanderer very adult.
None of the characters felt very real or deep, and I didn't connect with any of them. I'm not going to touch the mod squad's best friendship beyond saying it comes out of nowhere and is hard to believe. But I do want to address the language around Cinnamon's brother, who is gay. He's gay. That's not a bad word, and it's also not a word used until over halfway through the book. That's not to say his sexuality is in question though; he is referred to - frequently - by a very different, hateful word. I'm not condemning the author's use of a slur to communicate the beliefs and attitude of a character, but I do have a problem with that slur accompanying nearly every reference to a particular character.
Listening to the story as an audiobook does nothing to help with the general comprehension problem. In fact, I think reading a physical copy might have been easier. Time jumps, chapter divisions, and scene changes have almost no delineation, leaving the listener playing catch up with the shifts while the story moves on without them. The narrator's cadence requires some initial adjustment, and while her voice fits Cinnamon it feels too young for the Wanderer. Early in the story there are also several hesitations before pronouncing unfamiliar words, which make the narrator sound unsure and inexperienced.
I wish I could have loved this book. Thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for an audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.