written by Gail Giles
The only strength What Happened to Cass McBride? had was its writing. Everything else was utter garbage, especially the plot. Let's do the good first, before we get to my massive list of complaints, shall we? The writing style was very unique, dotted with cutesy little phrases here and there, making for a poetic read. Other than that, the only other thing I can positively remark on was my like of the fonts that allowed for easy differentiation between characters. Alright, so, the negatives. First of all, this is a murder mystery of sorts. So it's very strange that the story is set up in such a way that the reader knows pretty much all along who the culprit is, instead of finding out at the very end. Most of the plot is laid out very early on, which eliminates a lot of the drama and suspense that a good murder mystery should, in my opinion, contain. I'm sure it was done to set the book apart from others in the same genre, and it accomplishes that, but sometimes, I feel like the typical murder mystery IS a murder mystery because of its layout, and can be set apart by a particularly fantastic plot, instead of switching the general big picture order of events. The nonlinearity makes for an interesting storytelling format, but at the same time, makes the story just...boring. Throughout the whole book, I just couldn't bring myself to care about anyone I was supposed to care about or sympathize with. I didn't like the ending, I didn't care about any of the events, the story's excitement dies out within the first few pages, when all is revealed. I just don't think the order of events served the story well in this particular instance.
Rating: 2/5
I got this book from...:BookMooch
