A review by smessmores
Black Bottom Saints by Alice Randall

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

 I appreciate what the author was trying to do with the Catholic Saints Book format, but boy did it cause the story to drag too much for me. It would be one thing to have a one paragraph blurb about the person before Ziggy's story, but to have a blurb that takes up two pages that has literally nothing to do with the person? I get that we're supposed to be able to follow CG's story in it, but I did not care for that framing device at all. It took me out of the stories and people and made it very hard to read more than one chapter at a time. Sure, it would work fine if you did actually read one a week for 52 weeks, but when it's a book checked out from the library you don't get that luxury.

That said, it did make me want to learn more about the people mentioned. I just wish it more often actually dealt with the people mentioned. Far too frequently the story wasn't about the person, or even an interaction Ziggy had with the person, but rather the person was mentioned once at the beginning and then he'd go off on a description about something only tangentially related. It wasn't bad, it just didn't work with the expectation that the chapter would be about a particular person.