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A review by thisbookishcat
Farmed and Dangerous by Edith Maxwell
mysterious
medium-paced
3.0
Edited (because it was the middle of the night when I first wrote this up): This is one of your typical, fluffy murder mysteries, but without the fluidity of the ones you might normally read. The author has clearly spent a lot of time farming organically, but has no idea how to make that interesting and relevant to the plot. It felt like a lot of the time the farming was used as filler to pass the days as other, more interesting things, were happening in this town; that's not to say that farming doesn't take up a lot of your time, because it does, but she spent an awful lot of time away from home with in total, not a whole lot happening.
A big note of concern for me was the amount of alcohol our main character drank before getting behind the wheel of a vehicle, and on more than one occasion. The way this book flows and is written doesn't offer a understanding of the amount of time that passes between the events, so it often seems like the character would have a drink and within the half hour be behind the wheel of a car. I'm someone who likes a drink every once in a while, but with the time that seems to have passed, it feels more like we should be concerned for the mental health of this character than we should be nodding and going along with it all.
Last major note about this was that the author tried too hard to make this small down well-outside of Boston seem like it had the cultural diversity of somewhere like New York. While it is entirely possible for this to happen, especially in today's more modern age, I feel the author was a bit too heavy-handed with making sure that the book oozed with obvious diversity. It would have flowed a lot better if she treated all characters, no matter their background, as equals when it came to introducing them. Instead of focusing on where characters, or their parents, came from, it would have been more interesting to learn about their personality traits, or something quirky about them as people, not as a cultural group. That being said, there was a touch in there about an Eritrean man volunteering to help teach Eritrean children English so they could acclimate to America more smoothly and I thought that was a wonderful show of character from this particular book character.
Overall I felt that the main part of the story was entertaining, but there was so much filler and nonsense in the book that didn't need to be there. If you're bored and looking for a book in this genre then you may want to read it, otherwise I'd recommend spending your time on something else.
A big note of concern for me was the amount of alcohol our main character drank before getting behind the wheel of a vehicle, and on more than one occasion. The way this book flows and is written doesn't offer a understanding of the amount of time that passes between the events, so it often seems like the character would have a drink and within the half hour be behind the wheel of a car. I'm someone who likes a drink every once in a while, but with the time that seems to have passed, it feels more like we should be concerned for the mental health of this character than we should be nodding and going along with it all.
Last major note about this was that the author tried too hard to make this small down well-outside of Boston seem like it had the cultural diversity of somewhere like New York. While it is entirely possible for this to happen, especially in today's more modern age, I feel the author was a bit too heavy-handed with making sure that the book oozed with obvious diversity. It would have flowed a lot better if she treated all characters, no matter their background, as equals when it came to introducing them. Instead of focusing on where characters, or their parents, came from, it would have been more interesting to learn about their personality traits, or something quirky about them as people, not as a cultural group. That being said, there was a touch in there about an Eritrean man volunteering to help teach Eritrean children English so they could acclimate to America more smoothly and I thought that was a wonderful show of character from this particular book character.
Overall I felt that the main part of the story was entertaining, but there was so much filler and nonsense in the book that didn't need to be there. If you're bored and looking for a book in this genre then you may want to read it, otherwise I'd recommend spending your time on something else.