Good Morning/Sponsored Post

It's not even six-o-clock in the morning on a Monday, yet here I am sitting on the couch, in the dark, blogging. It's a meeting day. I'm usually not a proponent of publicly biting the hand that feeds you, but I'm on a big, "important" committee for work that I'm really struggling with. We're redesigning the curriculum to correlate to Common Core (another blog post, for another time) and it's just really frustrating and stressful (while I'm there, anyway). It's a lot to do and I'm often not sure if I've been equipped properly to do so. I'm not always the best at working with others... but here I am. Anyway, the one good thing (besides an hour lunch instead of the normal thirty minutes) is that I don't have to be there until 8:30, as opposed to our normal seven am contract time. So, here I am blogging in my jammies with a cup of coffee while Sawyer gets to sleep in. Lucky bastard. 

Wow. So that was a little out of context. Anyway. 

I'm really just quickly stopping by to report on Tana French's The Secret Place, which Penguin was generous to send me a copy of. Unfortunately, I wasn't a huge fan. Always in search of a solid, well-written, high-interest mystery, I had my hopes up, since I know some of her other books did well. This one was quite lengthy, at almost 400 pages, but that was fine. The premise was quite interesting, being about a cold case at a all-girl's school being resurrected by two detectives. The execution- not so much. 

The biggest flaw, for me, was the pacing. The book seriously dragged. The narration was split between the past, in the time leading up to the murder, and the present, during the rekindled investigation. This should have sped things along nicely, but it did not. I think one of the main problems was that the present section took place during one day and was mainly interviews between the detectives and the girls. This of course could have been done well, but was not.

The characters lacked depth. The ending wasn't anything special. The setting, an old all-girls school, could have added to the story, but it merely existed. The writing was generally a step or two above your standard mystery, although I couldn't figure out if she was going over-the-top with the unrealistic teenage dialogue on purpose sometimes or not.

This book had a lot of potential, but for me missed the mark.