Link to book – Dying for Christmas by Tammy Cohen
Rating – 2 out of stars.
I usually find it easier to write a review where I felt negatively towards a book but this one is really stumping me, I wanted to phrase it so that didn’t come across like I was just being judgy and picking faults, so here goes nothing!
First of all, the characters… I started off by feeling quite sorry for Jessica, she was our lead character in the story and it sounded like she had quite a rough time of things, oh was I wrong! As the story progressed Jessica became more and more of a truly unlikable character and I found it really hard to muster up any kind of positive feeling for her. As for the other characters within the story they just felt flat and 2D, as if they weren’t given the same thought as our star narrator…
And then the writing, I mean don’t get me wrong the actual writing was good, I couldn’t find a fault. But the way the book was physically written… With the police officers section dropped in at random points in a completely different font?! It just did not work for me and I found it to be quite distracting. It just really broke up the flow of the story and didn’t sit right with me.
As for the plot, I’m really in two minds about it, even now a week or so after finishing reading the book. I can definitely appreciate the effort that the author put into the story and crafting such a complex book, but at the same time that made it feel like there was too much going on. There were just a few too many twists and turns that were intent on wrapping you so far up in their web that you wouldn’t be able to tell if they even made sense or not.
Oh the ending, oh gosh the ending. I really was disappointed and to be honest a little bit angry that I read and wasted all my time reading this book for that ending?! It was shit. I can’t phrase that nicely, it was rubbish.
It felt as though all logic went out of the window with this one, and whilst I appreciate it’s a book and anything can go because it’s fiction it still felt illogical and unrealistic. There were one too many crazily concocted twists that just didn’t make sense or weren’t properly explained for one book.
On the whole, I was hugely disappointed with this one and I have a confession… I gave it away to the charity shop!
Until next time, Em xxx
What Em's Reading 