My Rating: 2 stars
This was another book that was on my list to read for the A to Z Author Challenge – it was for the letter "O" which is one of those letters that I had a hard time finding a book/author that matched. Coming up against the end of the year, this was one of the last few books I had left to complete this challenge and in all honesty, I regretted a bit saving this one until the end, reason being that if this had been earlier on in the year, I would have DNF'ed this book without hesitation. Instead, I forced myself to finish it, as there was no way this late in the game that I was going to start all over again and look for another book, especially with the time crunch this month and the already little time that I have for reading.
As is probably obvious from my rating, I did not like this book at all. Reading the summary, I thought the premise had potential and even after finishing the book, I still think the same, however the problem was in the author's poor execution of the story. First of all, I had a lot of problems with the writing – I don't know how else to put this, but the writing came across very "elementary" to me, almost feeling as though a teenager wrote it for a writing class and didn't do a good job getting it proofread before turning it in. There were a lot of grammar and sentence structure errors, misspellings, punctuation errors, etc. – a huge distraction for me, as I found myself trying to correct the errors in my mind as I went, which made it hard to concentrate on the story itself. But in the scheme of things, this actually turned out to be a relatively "minor" issue given that the problems with the writing went far beyond merely grammar and spelling mistakes – the inconsistent and overly-simplified style of the writing was a bigger problem that made this a very tedious read for me. There was way too much of what I would characterize as "fluff"—space fillers that had little to nothing to do with the plot, which bogged down the story tremendously. The author spent a lot of time describing things and events that didn't matter, details that, as the reader, we did not need to know (for example – I'm paraphrasing here but many of the sentences were similar to this: 'I started the car. It took me 30 minutes to drive to [name of the restaurant]. When I arrived, I sat down and ordered the breakfast special from the menu. It was the best breakfast I had in years. After that, I paid the bill, got back in the car and drove home. Exhausted, I went to bed. The next morning I woke up at 4:15 and started my day'). There's more though -- the main character in the book, Grace, is a private investigator (I will come back to this part later) and instead of focusing on the main storyline of Grace wanting to find out about her past, the author spent an excessive amount of time describing in detail each of the cases that Grace took on (from names of all the people involved in the cases to the various actions Grace took to "handle" the case for her clients – such as following so-and-so in her car and watching them walk into a hotel, then come out x number of minutes later with someone else, etc.). I would be ok with this type of detail if this were, say, a police procedural or a true "mystery" novel with legitimate cases to solve – but unfortunately, this was not the case at all, as NONE of the cases had anything to do with the main storyline about Grace's personal quest to find out whether her "hunch" about her identity was true or not. To be honest, I feel like 50% of this book could have been cut and the story would not have been affected in the least. There were also a lot of "coincidences," things that happened that were just way too contrived, convenient, and I felt like throughout the entire book, I had to suspend disbelief in order to get through the story.
I've seen this book classified under "historical fiction" and I can tell you right now that classification is wrong based on the way this book was written. Supposedly, the setting of the story is in the 1960s, with references to an earlier time period for some of the characters (the character mentioned in the title, Anna, her story actually took place in the 1940s), but if you were to tell me that this story actually takes place in 2017, I would absolutely believe it. That's because the style of the writing was way too modern and most of the word choices did not seem to fit the setting. At one point, I felt like I was reading a YA novel – books that I'm definitely not the target audience for. A few examples: words like "no kidding" (which was so over-used throughout the book that it verged on the point of being annoying), "what the hell," "crap" (and a bunch of other modern day curse words), "wuss," "potty break" (which was used to describe a grown man taking a break from his work to use the restroom), etc. – and that's just scratching the surface! I did not feel a sense of time and place with the story at all, which is obviously a huge problem.
In terms of the characters – well, all I'm going to say is that there was very little character development. A bunch of characters were thrown in throughout the story, but none of them were developed, with many of them being "side" characters that had nothing to do with the main story. Also, the way the author wrote the main character Grace made her utterly unlikeable. From the getgo, I was annoyed with Grace and her unsubstantiated "insistence" that Anna was her mother and her adopted parents had perhaps "kidnapped" her when she was a baby and even though they loved her, she could not shake away the possibility that they were somehow involved in her birth mother's death – this is the premise that was reiterated throughout the entire story and it seemed that Grace's main goal throughout the entire narrative was to "confirm" that these "assumptions" were true. What irritated me most about Grace though is that she was a private investigator, a supposedly "smart" woman, but yet everything she did was completely opposite of what someone who had gone to "law enforcement school" as she put it, would actually do. Not only did Grace have no common sense whatsoever, she also had no investigative skills beyond rudimentary level and often ended up in disastrous situations due to her own (self-admitted) stupid and stubborn actions. In fact, at multiple points throughout the story (way more times than needed), Grace would actually comment how bad her investigative skills were (i.e. she repeated every couple pages – 'so much for having a private investigator license' or 'so much for going to law enforcement school') – it was especially annoying given that the entire narrative was told from Grace's first person point of view, so the reader had no choice but to endure her constant whining and flip-floppy decision-making.
In the end, after pushing myself to finish this book, I decided to rate it 2 stars. This might sound generous given all the issues I had with this book, but in all fairness, there truly was a legitimate "mystery" in here in terms of Anna's backstory and there were also a few twists and turns worked in that made that part of the story interesting enough to want to find out what happened to her. In the hands of a more capable writer, I think this would have ended up being a good, intriguing story – unfortunately though, that wasn't the case here and after about the halfway mark, I skimmed the rest of the way through the book. While this is a book I would not recommend, I seem to be one of the outliers here, as there were some highly rated reviews for this book from other readers so perhaps check those out before deciding.
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