Darth Pedant

This was a bit of a weird reading experience for me. I liked the characters and the mysteries and the descriptions of the food and the goings-on in Corinna’s bakery, and yet I kind of hated the writing style. It’s in first person with occasional stream-of-consciousness-esque shifting verb tenses which drove me up the wall, and the solution to one of the mysteries is kept back until the very end even though the reader is in Corinna’s head and should have seen her figure it out. Quite a few things Corinna does are kept from the reader until Corinna explains the solution to other characters, and it was so jarring that I was flipping back through pages to see if I’d accidentally skipped some before I realized it was either a cheap trick or lazy writing. Withholding info from the reader like that just doesn’t really work in a first person narrative. So I was annoyed by the writing style and the first person and Corinna’s inexplicably knowing things the reader doesn’t get to see her discover or work out on her own, but I still had a hard time putting it down and will probably read the next book if I can find it at the library.

TL;DR: I’m entertained and annoyed and seriously craving fresh bread.