The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
The Golden Spoon is about a baking show involving 6 contestants held on the grounds of a manor who is owned by the host of the show. This season, a secondary host is brought in to help liven it up. It follows the competition as well as the lives of the people staying at the house during the taping. It technically takes place in Vermont but the entire time I was thinking it was England due to the obvious nod to The Great British Bake Off. There are secrets, murder, and some baking. The book featured chapters from each of the contestants in the first person but then the host was 3rd person. The sheer number of narrators and the change of perspective was grating. One character was young, full of herself, and unlikeable. Another was very two dimensional and fake. It seemed he was written as a caricature instead of a real person. 2 other characters were interchangeable to me. One had no impact on the story whatsoever. I had to constantly refer to the front where backstories and descriptions were written out. They just didn’t pop and were not unique. The writing bothered me as well. There were things that didn’t add up and didn’t make sense like a character described as doing something then completing that same action a few paragraphs later. Once, the phrase “this far into the competition” was used and it was only the second day. I rolled my eyes. The same silent scream metaphor was used too many times and the use of a wardrobe was cliché. It was all too predictable as well. I could see the connection a mile away. This was not a mystery or a thriller or any combination of the two. The inside cover provides false, leading statements about how the book unfolds. I would say one good thing was that it was a quick and easy read. I would say do not bother with this one as there are much better books dealing with baking and/or murder.
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Tag: boring
The Wine Scam, Provenance, and How To Get Drunk With A 1800s President
The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This book is about a fraud perpetrated in the wine world that many people knowingly or unknowingly participated in. Benjamin Wallace’s writing follows the apparent “discovery” and sale/auction of a cache of wines purportedly belonging to Thomas Jefferson. He tries to tie this together over multiple decades from the 18th century with Thomas Jefferson and the late 20th century into the 21st with all these rare vintages that were found and sold. It delves into the wine world on both sides of the Atlantic and references many players in this space. It was an aggravating read as people can suck and consequences be damned. I cannot believe the lack of caring by the people in this book regarding provenance, especially the auction houses. Everyone just wants to make a buck and doesn’t care about authenticity. That is what hurt me most about this book. The lack of veracity in historical artifacts. At first The Billionaire’s Vinegar started off boringly. There were tons of people, vintages, and vineyards rattled off that they lost all meaning and contributed very little to the story. This somewhat continued throughout the book, and it was hard to work out the connections or refer back to who exactly a person was. I wish the structure of it was more cohesive. There would be times a person would be mentioned who was conducting a test or some other random person and suddenly, we would be delving into their backstory. We would be given a history that contributed nothing. It was exhausting and dull. It would just around between different timelines and there did not seem to be a connecting thread that was being followed. The ending was also horrible. I was so hopeful for this book as I like historical, intriguing, and sudden find type themes. There were pockets of intrigue but there were too many deviations into uninteresting topics to help hold this one up. Ultimately, I would skip this one but looking into wine and its history especially the rare ones, would be interesting in and of itself.
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Bored To Death and Other Queer, Geeky Ways To Die
Board to Death by C.J. Connor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is about 30-year-old guy who chooses to come back to Utah and help run a board game shop for his father as his father was diagnosed with a medical issue. He is gay and recently divorced. A shop owner neighbor comes into his life as a murder takes place on his doorstep. The murder seems to revolve around an original game that predates Monopoly. There is a small amount of romance and an even smaller amount of mystery. I am not sure how to classify this one. I cannot find a genre to place it in. The book dips it’s toe into a few different classification pools but never takes the plunge. The main character, Ben, annoyed me slightly. I am not a fan of the meek, easily scared, or pitiful literary trope and unfortunately Ben fits this mold. Granted, it is not as strong with him as other characters, but it still applies. There were two quotes that I did enjoy though. “I loved attempting to read Dune. It was so much easier to accomplish than actually finishing it.” I relate as I have attempted several times to get more than 50 pages into that novel. The other I thought was funny and unique was “I’d had a bowl of Thin Mints doused in milk for breakfast, for goodness sakes. You can’t ethically expose the world to yourself when you are in that state of mind.” Sadly, two good quotes do not a good novel make. Ben was not a good sleuth (he just started giving all his own information away at one point) and it felt that he had no impact on moving the story along. I can’t recall of anything he did by himself. It was bland but a very easy read. I did like that it had queer elements though. You can skip Board to Death and play Solitaire instead.
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