The Block Party by Jamie Day
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If only, if only, if only….
….there hadn’t been so many secrets.
or certain people hadn’t “looked the other way.”
Every one of the residents on the Alton Road cul de sac had something to hide.
I had a hard time engaging with the characters in this mystery. Right off the bat, either the angry teenager’s brittle attitude was getting on my nerves, or Alex, her flaky mother, was aggravating me with her paltry attempts at hiding the fact that she was three sheets to the wind and had fallen off the sobriety wagon at this momentous Block Party. (Move the action along, please, I kept begging the narrator! Give me some of that page turning stuff the blurb had promised me.)
In fact, I was constantly being irritated by one character or another throughout this story. I often found the writing style was too breezy in some sections, and in others it seemed to me that the author was taking forever to advance the action.
I’m rating this one a 3.5 out of 5., rounded down to a 3 because GoodReads does not allow half stars. My thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
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3 replies on “The Block Party, by Jamie Day.”
Sounds like some characters were rather cliche. It’s always sad when a mystery has weak characters, and/or focuses on the wrong ones.
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You got it in one guess, Stefan! YOU could have written the review for this one. I’m in the minority: many people raved about this one. I found the writing formulaic and the characters even more so.
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I get that feeling. Like, some years back, everyone was raving about how good a movie “lost in translation” is. I watched it, and to this day, I don’t know what they movie is about apart from the fact that Bill Murray drinks japanese Whisky. I certainly never got on that band wagon.
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