Witty Little Knitter

Just for once I want a book with an an awesome title to actually be awesome...this one was just a mess.

First: the narrator. Ida uses a terribly stilted grammar that just isn't realistic for somebody who while not a native-speaker has lived in the US for over 50 years. She also reminds me of my more annoying relatives. The noisy ones who despise everything modern (i.e. post 1960...), feel superior about it and go on constant 'In my days everything was easier and so much better'. She spends a page talking about the fact that nowadays you can buy magazines for every hobby there is. Apparently the rising number of magazine titles is indirectly proportional to her life-quality because I can't imagine another reason why anybody would be that upset about this. No it's not cute, just really, really annoying.

The case...I am tempted to put that into quotation marks because every cozy should be really ashamed of presenting such a ridiculous and shallow story as case. In fact it was solved about 60% in the book...and by that I mean Mrs. Kaplan has most of the necessary information that is needed to solve the case but she won't share it with Ida or the reader. Because...because she doesn't want to share it. This was the point where I loudly yelled 'Oh for fucks sake' at my Kindle because I couldn't believe it. That's just so incredibly lazy writing I can't believe that this is actually done outside very bad fanfiction...(but then 50SOG got published as well...)

The final 40% continue like that. Mrs. Kaplan collects some more information by the power of incredibly plot-convenience (or am I the only person in this world who doesn't have a friend who has a friend who is a burglar that owes them a favour?) but didn't share them till the last chapter because fuck The 10 Rules of Detective Fiction. You dear book are definitely not a detective story, you are just a horrible, horrible book...pages with words on it.

Oh there's also some side-characters that made several 70s sitcoms call and say 'Wow, and we though we only had flat and stereotypical characters' but I am to exhausted to yell about those.

ARC provided by NetGalley