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A review by gabs_myfullbookshelf
Murder Tightly Knit by Vannetta Chapman
2.0
1.5 stars
This was my first 'real' amish fiction book. Aside from a few YA amish titles, (I liked one, detested the other) I have never really thought that they would be my thing, but amish + murder mystery seemed to be a bit more interesting than most amish fiction. However, that didn't end up being the case. I rounded up my rating because I don't know if perhaps it's just that this genre isn't my thing and I don't want to be unfair in this review.
I'm afraid that this book was quite boring. Now, I didn't expect this book to be a chilling thriller. I mean...it's amish fiction. But for a mystery, it wasn't even mysterious, and that was my problem.
First off, the characters. Wow, they were borrrrring. There was no personality with any of these people! Amber, Hannah, Jesse...they were very two dimensional and not very colorful as characters. They were the opposite of colorful. They were the bleakest, slush-coloured grey characters I have encountered in a long time.
The mystery...not a mystery at all, more like. First off, we get a few chapters from the murdererer's POV, so there's no question that it is not one of the main or secondary characters. Second, there are no plot twists. Zip. Zilch. It's a very straightforward plot and you can see where it's going. Not fun. The end was very anti-climactic and nothing new was revealed.
And do amish people only use Pennsylvania Dutch words that are cognates for the english translation? (I'm being sarcastic, of course, they don't.) No, so why are those the only kind that show up in this book? And why have a dictionary for them? I mean, I didn't even look at the dictionary, and I could definitely figure out that nein was no and bruder was brother. In fact, all the random sprinkling of amish phrases actually annoyed me a bit.
Murder Tightly Knit has a bit of an ironic title since the whole murder unraveled pretty easily. I don't think I'll be trying amish fiction for a very long time unless I have ran out of all other reading material.
This was my first 'real' amish fiction book. Aside from a few YA amish titles, (I liked one, detested the other) I have never really thought that they would be my thing, but amish + murder mystery seemed to be a bit more interesting than most amish fiction. However, that didn't end up being the case. I rounded up my rating because I don't know if perhaps it's just that this genre isn't my thing and I don't want to be unfair in this review.
I'm afraid that this book was quite boring. Now, I didn't expect this book to be a chilling thriller. I mean...it's amish fiction. But for a mystery, it wasn't even mysterious, and that was my problem.
First off, the characters. Wow, they were borrrrring. There was no personality with any of these people! Amber, Hannah, Jesse...they were very two dimensional and not very colorful as characters. They were the opposite of colorful. They were the bleakest, slush-coloured grey characters I have encountered in a long time.
The mystery...not a mystery at all, more like. First off, we get a few chapters from the murdererer's POV, so there's no question that it is not one of the main or secondary characters. Second, there are no plot twists. Zip. Zilch. It's a very straightforward plot and you can see where it's going. Not fun. The end was very anti-climactic and nothing new was revealed.
And do amish people only use Pennsylvania Dutch words that are cognates for the english translation? (I'm being sarcastic, of course, they don't.) No, so why are those the only kind that show up in this book? And why have a dictionary for them? I mean, I didn't even look at the dictionary, and I could definitely figure out that nein was no and bruder was brother. In fact, all the random sprinkling of amish phrases actually annoyed me a bit.
Murder Tightly Knit has a bit of an ironic title since the whole murder unraveled pretty easily. I don't think I'll be trying amish fiction for a very long time unless I have ran out of all other reading material.