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Aoife

Witty Little Knitter

I read fantasy, crime, true crime, lgbt-romance and books written by my favourite comedians. List not necessarily complete.
Sometimes I write for Bibliodaze

Currently reading

Stephen and Matilda
Jim Bradbury
Progress: 52/262 pages
Krieg und Frieden
Michael Grusemann, Leo Tolstoy
Progress: 579/1024 pages

Review: At Arms

At Arms - A. Rosaria

I think one of the reasons I went 'whut?' after finishing this was that this wasn't what I expected from the book after reading the blurb. This book is advertised as a short-story collection but it's not really one. It's one coherent story told by different POV-characters, they're arranged in chronological order and while it is probably possible to read each story as stand-alone without knowledge of the others and not get completely confused you will miss a lot of things if you do that.
However it still feels as if the chapters try to be short-stories in that they're all short (geez, really?), they have that 'slice of life'-feeling where you are catapulted into something that is happening, don't know exactly how it all started and get a somewhat open end and - due to the shortness - you also don't get much character-depth.

That's what caused most of my problems. The protagonists seem to be there to have the plot happen to them but don't appear to be characters in their own right. I can actually let that slide as the plot itself is pretty cool and was thrilling enough that I really wanted to know how it ends but at the same time I simply find it really hard to believe that a girl would fall head-over-heels in love with a guy she just saw from afar but never talked with him and then is devastated enough to throw herself on the ground and cry when he tells her that he has no feelings for her. Here I really would have prefered if it had been a bit longer and taken some time to show how these feelings developed.

A minor pet-peeve was also the language. For most of the book I had no issues but in one story a character gives a speech that sounds like right out of an old and slightly dusty costume-drama and in another a guy complains about somebody 'whining' and people land on their 'butts' which just threw me out.