The Door in the Alley

You ever read a book that tries so hard to be cute and quirky and it just fails miserably for you? Yeah, that was this one for me. I love the idea of the book, I adored a previous book by this author that I read - but this book just doesn't work for me. Really, more than anything, it's the writing style that I had a problem with. It shatters the fourth-wall (which, in and of itself, isn't something I find funny) and the narrator is a character (no, I don't mean that the narrator is one of the characters, I mean the narrator is a separate and removed entity from the rest of the book that narrates things and pretty much drags me out of the story). (And there's footnotes - over half in the first forty pages and that kept pulling me away from the story.) And, honestly, some of the wording choices sounded odd (like a child using big words to sound ‘all grown up'). That's not to say this is a bad book - because it's not - but it definitely wasn't the book for me.

(This is one of the few times I wish I gave out half stars, because I could see rating it 2 1/2 stars but it's not as good as my other 3 star books. So I rounded down.)