should_be_reading 's review for:

39 Winks by Kathleen Valenti

2.0

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This installment of Maggie O'Malley is...okay.

Don't get me wrong, we still get a great protagonist. Lots of nerdy movie quotes. Miss Vanilla (I love that Hamster). A fun and unpredictable mystery. Lots of great things!


But we also get a strange ending. The mystery gets solved satisfactorily, but the recap that the characters take us on (oh, what ever would we do without those recaps!) seems to forget a lot of what happened. And I don't mean they forgot to bring up a tiny thing that really makes no difference. I mean a major aspect of the mystery gets left behind like it never happened. That bothers me.
Secondarily, there's a bit of an issue with another plot point. A character notices something (

Spoiler

the smell of blood

) that brings their attention to another thing, then the original "thing" is undone later on, leaving a large gap in the logic of the story for me. You can't lead a character somewhere important using some sort of signal, then decide that the signal never existed, because if the signal never existed, the character couldn't have been lead to the thing! (Okay, ignore my rambling, but you see the catch 22 it creates?)

Basically, this had a few problems that just happen to get on my last nerve.
I'm still going to keep reading. I hope that the next one is better.