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A review by nakedsushi
All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe
3.0
I picked up All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe a few months ago because I liked Brave Story, a novel geared towards younger audiences. All She Was Worth was Miyabe’s first adult book that I’ve read and one of the few mystery novels I’ve read this year.
All She Was Worth starts off with the disappearance of a woman and follows an on-leave detective as he tries to find her and uncover the unusual circumstances in which she disappeared. Although that’s the main mystery flowing through the book, I didn’t find it that engaging. I already guessed what had happened to her and the characters of the book felt so distanced.
The story takes place in present-day Japan and the Miyabe does thorough albeit sometimes dull job of describing Japanese consumer culture. There were points in the book where I felt the author was being too didactic and the things the characters were saying sounded artificial. It was almost like reading a guide-book about Japanese culture.
The payoff of a good mystery book is the “aha!” moment when everything just clicks. Unfortunately, that never really happened in All She Was Worth because the reader will know exactly what happened by the first half of the book. Most of the book is proving and finding evidence of what happened.
I was egged on to read the book by my curiosity concerning the motives of fugitive character. It was disappointing to see the story ending so abruptly and not answering any of the questions I had. The ending felt like a cliffhanger of a show that never got to run its next season.
All She Was Worth starts off with the disappearance of a woman and follows an on-leave detective as he tries to find her and uncover the unusual circumstances in which she disappeared. Although that’s the main mystery flowing through the book, I didn’t find it that engaging. I already guessed what had happened to her and the characters of the book felt so distanced.
The story takes place in present-day Japan and the Miyabe does thorough albeit sometimes dull job of describing Japanese consumer culture. There were points in the book where I felt the author was being too didactic and the things the characters were saying sounded artificial. It was almost like reading a guide-book about Japanese culture.
The payoff of a good mystery book is the “aha!” moment when everything just clicks. Unfortunately, that never really happened in All She Was Worth because the reader will know exactly what happened by the first half of the book. Most of the book is proving and finding evidence of what happened.
I was egged on to read the book by my curiosity concerning the motives of fugitive character. It was disappointing to see the story ending so abruptly and not answering any of the questions I had. The ending felt like a cliffhanger of a show that never got to run its next season.