Several months ago, I won The Diamond Escape by Sheila Bitts in a Goodreads Giveaway. Earlier this month, I finished reading it. This book has a lot of characters and is confusing in places.
Do We Really Need to Know the Characters’ Heights?
The idea of this book sounded good, but it just really didn’t work for me. The best way that I can explain it is to say that I felt like the author went overboard with information in some areas and skimmed over things in other areas. For example, I think she mentioned the exact height of every character in the book. Five foot seven seems to be a popular height. Height was emphasized so much in the book that I figured it was going to play an important part in the case. I’ll give you a hint. It doesn’t.
Even though she mentioned the heights of pretty much every character in the book, many of the characters blended together. Maybe a character chart would have helped with this. There were a lot of characters introduced, especially for a novel this short.
Date Information Overload
The author also often referred to dates by both the day, such as June 17 and the day of the week, such as Wednesday. It made the story not flow as well, especially when it was mentioned in casual conversation. For me, I feel like either the day or the day of the week would have been enough, especially when the dates were often just a few days ago.
Confusing and Incomplete Plot
For me, the plot was a bit confusing. There were a lot of places where I felt like the plot jumped around, and I wasn’t sure how we’d gotten to that point in the story. The storyline really didn’t flow very well. I think one of the problems was that when we’d get to exciting parts in the story, instead of allowing the reader to see that scene, we just basically got a summary of what happened during that part. I felt like the story had the potential to be a fun, exciting story, but it felt like a first draft mixed with a basic plot summary, not a polished book.
What Went Well
On a good note, this book does have good grammar overall. I only noticed a few grammar issues. It’s on the clean side. We don’t get graphic violence or sexual content. If I’m counting right, there were four swear words. I may have missed one or two, but the first one I noticed was about 60% of the way through the book. It caught me a bit off guard because there hadn’t been swearing before that.
Final Thoughts
Normally, when I give a book 2 stars, I feel like it’s a boring book with no potential. The thing is that I feel like this could have been a good book. It probably wouldn’t be 5-star quality, but it could have been a 4-star book. It just needed some work. I think I could have enjoyed this book if the author had worked with a really good editor or even had a great group of beta readers. They could have helped her realize where her manuscript needed some work.
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