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bexellency's Reviews (980)
A solid cozy. Not amazing but good enough to listen to the others. Characters are charicatures, over the top. Book weirdly alludes to prior mysteries but in #1 in the series. Main character has super off putting attitudes about Dia de Los Muertos (inane and culturally insensitive to endless complain about the skeleton imagery) and about Tops, the slow, house less neighbor, where she makes zero effort to do anything beyond big and homeless therefore scary.
So, you start off my going to Paris just so you can complain about French food and French influence of cuisine. Not off to a great start. And this reads like someone's dissertation. Abandoned quickly.
Uh, conflicted? I don’t love Fedarko’s writing style; it’s a bit ponderous and heavy handed in the forward looking illusions. Did the audiobook, read by him, and his voices for other people in the story were, um, weird guess. This is definitely an adventure book written by a man. It’s a misadventure because they start unprepared (and not in the nothing can prepare you for the Grand Canyon sense). I’d rather read a book by one of the amazing people who ends up helping them. The cultural sensitive is weak - don’t call it Indian Gardens and tell us you’ll explain later why it’s now called something else; call it Havasupai Gardens (the correct current name) and explain later why it used to be called something else. Don’t fall into the micro aggression trap of saying the native name will be hard to pronounce; do the homework and learn to say it. So, I was generally grumpy about the book, but I did learn a lot about the Grand Canyon, which was my goal in picking it up.
Fun and spunky, just like you expect Anna McNuff to be. These short adventure tales were excellent, varied, and as shorts avoided any issues of ponderous or overly explained learnings in the denouement. My only wish, that the audio book had a bit of a pause between the end of one chapter and the start of the next. That pause was shorter than the pause between sentences!!!
The lovely romp I’ve come to expect, with a late surprise during what feels like the denouement and then even later then that, a cliffhanger ending. At least that means there’s more. . The homosexuality is handled differently in this book than the others, more front and center. An interesting change.
Not a good read. Pretty short is the best compliment I can come up with. Depressing and super styalized writing, which works for something the length of an essay but grows tedious for a novel or even a novella.
Solid. A good reminder to a seasoned running of the joys, the ways running changes you, the things that are normal for runners but not for the general public. I appreciate how many different books there are about running, how many different perspectives. This one is all about the fun and the community. A bit repetitive (the audiobook seemed to have played without me at some point and I couldn’t figure out how far back to go to pick up where I left off).
I had trouble getting into this at first. Went away to listen to something else and then came back and enjoyed the remainder much better. Fascinating descriptions of food and dish ware. Loved the detective work explanations. It’s a sweet book about food evoking memories. Most episodic for each visitor; I found the thru plot very light, nearly non-existent. Or maybe I just missed it listening instead of reading and breaking it into two parts. Also, not knowing much about Japanese food, the descriptions were largely things I couldn’t picture, so I’m sure I missed out of some of the experience.
Light and quirky. Fun enough, although I routinely missed whos chapter I was in and was reading human as dog or vice versa. If these existed as audiobooks, I’d probably keep reading.