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A review by napkins
Smoke by Catherine McKenzie
2.0
I don't actually know how I finished this.
The jumps in the point of view, the switches of tense, voice, and character, were bad enough. Add in that I just couldn't connect with the characters or their motivation at all, and I'm amazed I dragged myself through this as quickly as I did.
The writing isn't bad, and that's the main reason it gets 2 stars instead of 1. It could have been a better story, in my mind, if McKenzie had stuck to one narrator and told one story. Many of the same goals could have been accomplished, but without the strange disconnect that kept me from really connecting to either narrator. The resolution of the mystery was easily enough discerned from early on, so it's not so much a mystery as the resolution of two women, two mothers, in a small town.
The jumps in the point of view, the switches of tense, voice, and character, were bad enough. Add in that I just couldn't connect with the characters or their motivation at all, and I'm amazed I dragged myself through this as quickly as I did.
The writing isn't bad, and that's the main reason it gets 2 stars instead of 1. It could have been a better story, in my mind, if McKenzie had stuck to one narrator and told one story. Many of the same goals could have been accomplished, but without the strange disconnect that kept me from really connecting to either narrator. The resolution of the mystery was easily enough discerned from early on, so it's not so much a mystery as the resolution of two women, two mothers, in a small town.