Pogo Dragon's Reviews > The Quarter Storm

2 stars? 3 stars? Something in that area anyway.

I wanted, like so many other people have said in reviews, to love this book. It has so many appealing elements, New Orleans, magic, murder mystery, food. It could have been great. But it fell as flat as a pancake. I found myself skimming quite a lot of the book. The characters were a bit like Plasticine when you've sludged it all together - they were all written in the same note, so hard to remember who was which and what was what.

My main problem with the book though was that the author seems to have taken on board writing advice given to junior school children and there are just So Many Iffy Metaphors in there. Everything is "as X as a Y", and the X and Y rarely relate to each other or make sense. If ever a book were in need of a good editor this was it.

As a personal stylistic preference I am not a fan of books written in the first person, this one is and it started grating quite early on. At least it wasn't written in the present tense as well, that would have made it unfinishable for me.

Sadly, much as I love the premise of the book I'll not be trying any more from this author. I think I paid about the right price for it as a Kindle First choice. And it was better than many in that I did at least finish it.