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A review by mrsbooknerd
White Nights by Ann Cleeves
1.0
Reading this was like wading through treacle. Hard going and slow. There were some good points but not many and I'm annoyed with myself for sticking with it to end, I should have given up at 100 pages.
The writing style is fine. Cleeves has a truncated, blunt sort of style. Short sentences that make reading fairly easy and vivid descriptions which paint the setting very clearly.
There was also a thought out and interesting plot hidden within the pages.
Here Endeth the praise.
There was little emotion in this book despite the fact that it should have had a lot of emotion at times. Jimmy was quite flat, he barely seemed human in his interactions. As the main narrative voice I felt that I should have known him better than I did.
I didn't like the romance between Jimmy and Fran. Neither seemed to take it seriously. She went off with a pretty face for lunch despite Jimmy and he fantasised about an actress with Fran sitting a metre away. They didn't seem that in to each other and so I wasn't in to them either.
I disliked Taylor. Were we supposed to like him? He was rude and arrogant, competitive to an obsessive degree. All round I did not like his character.
I have no idea why Kenny was a narrator. His chapters were so dull that by the end I was skipping huge chunks.
The pacing was so bad. So very slow and plodding. There was barely any progression of the history behind the murders so we just kept getting more and more bodies but no more information. The whole police work seemed shoddy and Jimmy guessing the killer at the end was so random. He had no evidence but he just knew things.
So much time was spent setting the scene and telling us about the locations and life in Shetland that the plot was totally forgotten. Literally in the middle of an investigation and Jimmy spent 3 pages telling us how he wished he could shear sheep!
It is annoying because the plot was intriguing and I wanted to know who and why but it was a real uphill struggle to keep going.
The writing style is fine. Cleeves has a truncated, blunt sort of style. Short sentences that make reading fairly easy and vivid descriptions which paint the setting very clearly.
There was also a thought out and interesting plot hidden within the pages.
Here Endeth the praise.
There was little emotion in this book despite the fact that it should have had a lot of emotion at times. Jimmy was quite flat, he barely seemed human in his interactions. As the main narrative voice I felt that I should have known him better than I did.
I didn't like the romance between Jimmy and Fran. Neither seemed to take it seriously. She went off with a pretty face for lunch despite Jimmy and he fantasised about an actress with Fran sitting a metre away. They didn't seem that in to each other and so I wasn't in to them either.
I disliked Taylor. Were we supposed to like him? He was rude and arrogant, competitive to an obsessive degree. All round I did not like his character.
I have no idea why Kenny was a narrator. His chapters were so dull that by the end I was skipping huge chunks.
The pacing was so bad. So very slow and plodding. There was barely any progression of the history behind the murders so we just kept getting more and more bodies but no more information. The whole police work seemed shoddy and Jimmy guessing the killer at the end was so random. He had no evidence but he just knew things.
So much time was spent setting the scene and telling us about the locations and life in Shetland that the plot was totally forgotten. Literally in the middle of an investigation and Jimmy spent 3 pages telling us how he wished he could shear sheep!
It is annoying because the plot was intriguing and I wanted to know who and why but it was a real uphill struggle to keep going.