Assorted Reviews #6

[alaterdate]

A Botanist's Guide to Parties and Poisons by Kate Khavari. Uh, didn't realize this was a "cozy mystery" or else I probably wouldn't have read it. It's not as niche as Mary Noelle Solves the Gingerbread Man Christmas Murder or things like that, but I still went into this expecting something else. This book follows a young botany research assistant named Saffron Everleigh who has to solve an attempted murder and exonerate her professor while also navigating a chance for love with a colleague.
It was SO SLOW and bogged down badly with irrelevant scenes. I also felt that the level of description of sexual harassment Saffron faced in the workplace came out of nowhere regarding the tone of the book. I can understand the inclusion as this is a book about a woman pushing boundaries in the workplace/academia, but it didn't feel like it was centering her and instead used as a shorthand to make an antagonist villainous.
It was really really boring and I wanted to quit reading it, but I pushed through then took a nap.

Babel by R.F. Kuang. My second Kuang book, I only read the first book in the Poppy War series and I didn't like it, I don't think I wrote a review though. Once again, here's a book I thought was supposed to be adult, but all I have to say is that Kuang's ideas far outpace her writing skill.

Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim. This book is a retelling of the Grimm's fairy tale The Wild Swans. I listened to the audiobook for this and I couldn't tell if the characters were supposed to be Chinese or Japanese because the setting seemed very Chinese, but a lot of names sounded Japanese. There was also touches of racism that kept bothering me, with the main character calling the male lead a barbarian multiple times.
The pacing was garbage with so many scenes of meandering. So much happened that had no bearing at all on the end, thanks to the end having a surprise villain! The prose wasn't too bad, but didn't make up for the rest of the mess.

Comments

[pauraque]

Mary Noelle Solves the Gingerbread Man Christmas Murder

Lmao. XD I have someone friended on here who reads this kind of cozy mystery and posts a lot of reviews of them. I find it kind of fascinating because it's not my genre at all and that makes me curious what people are getting out of it. But I'm not sure if I've figured that out yet, because the person who posts the reviews seems to find it tiresome when the books repeat the same cutesy tropes and unrealistic scenarios over and over, but... isn't that the point of them?? Why would you read so many cozy mysteries if you find it boring when they do all the things that cozy mysteries normally do? To me this is the true mystery.

[alaterdate]

Hahah yeah, I have a friend who reads them, particularly the Christmas ones, and I could not get into them. They're too twee for me. I also thought the appeal is that they're something you can relax with by knowing all the tropes and beats already. Seems the game is afoot in "Pauraque and the Mystery of the Cozy Mystery Connoisseur!"

[pauraque]

Oh boy, I'll have to get a cat and become the proprietor of a bakery or maybe a used bookstore!

[pseudo_tsuga]

Kuang's ideas far outpace her writing skill.

OOOOHHHHHHHH

Sorry to hear all of your recent reading choices were flops!

[alaterdate]

Lol 😎

Thanks! Sometimes you just get a batch of bad apples 😔🍎🐛