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A review by severina2001
A Pug's Tale by Alison Pace
1.0
An art restorer and her pug set out to solve the mystery of a missing painting.
This is not particularly the type of book I would normally read. I was searching for books to meet some reading prompts, and this one fit prompts for "about art" and "to celebrate the grand museum." It seemed cute, and how could a story with a pug as an assistant amateur detective go wrong?
Alas, the author is going for a light and breezy, dare I say quirky, tone. But the heroine, Hope, merely seems incredibly dense. Written in the first person, there's a break after practically every sentence in every conversation for Hope to internally muse over something. It takes a full page to get through a conversation that consists essentially of Hello / Hello / How are you. The conversations she does have are insipid and repetitive. The secondary characters are uninteresting and bland. I mean, the bones are there. She's got an eccentric philanthropist, a boss who she used to crush on, the strange private investigator. But literally *nothing happens*. And there's not even a twisty plot to fall back on, because the clues are not exactly difficult to crack.
*sigh* Maybe the next mystery I try will be better.
This is not particularly the type of book I would normally read. I was searching for books to meet some reading prompts, and this one fit prompts for "about art" and "to celebrate the grand museum." It seemed cute, and how could a story with a pug as an assistant amateur detective go wrong?
Alas, the author is going for a light and breezy, dare I say quirky, tone. But the heroine, Hope, merely seems incredibly dense. Written in the first person, there's a break after practically every sentence in every conversation for Hope to internally muse over something. It takes a full page to get through a conversation that consists essentially of Hello / Hello / How are you. The conversations she does have are insipid and repetitive. The secondary characters are uninteresting and bland. I mean, the bones are there. She's got an eccentric philanthropist, a boss who she used to crush on, the strange private investigator. But literally *nothing happens*. And there's not even a twisty plot to fall back on, because the clues are not exactly difficult to crack.
*sigh* Maybe the next mystery I try will be better.