A review by believedcrazy
Drowned Vanilla by Helen Merrick, Livia Day, Alisa Krasnostein
5.0
Disclaimer: I received this book free through Goodreads First Reads.
Reading this book made me crave ice cream with every new chapter, and I don’t even like ice cream! That’s how good this book is, it makes you want things you don’t even like.
Let me start by saying that I haven’t read the first book in this series, so I was worried I would go into this book not knowing any of the characters, but thankfully character backgrounds are fleshed out towards the beginning of this book so I immediately felt comfortable reading this. I will try to pick up the first book however, because reading Drowned Vanilla just made me more and more curious as to Tabitha’s adventure in the first book.
Okay now onto the book. Drowned Vanilla is a truly magical book. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did, I was worried it might be a bit too eccentric in a ‘trying too hard to be different’ kind of way, but this book balances all it’s elements perfectly. It has just the right amount of romance without overpowering the story or taking away from the plot, whilst also having enough crime that I wasn’t dissatisfied, and to top it off it added interesting elements like recipes and blog entries which kept the story fresh and engaging.
This book is set in Tasmania, which was really interesting to me because I do live in Tasmania and I’ve never read a fictional novel set here before so it was really exciting to read this and be surrounded by that sense of familiarity.
The characters are what really make this book special. They were all written with such care and given such distinctive voices, I was never bored or irritated reading them, even the characters I didn’t care for. Tabitha is definitely going on my list of favourite protagonists, she is intelligent and confident, but she is also flawed, and I couldn’t help fall in love with her as the book went on. I loved reading Stewart too, he’s a character I’m going to remember for a long time. I especially like that Stewart’s Scottish accent was written as it would have been spoken, it made him even more fun to read.
The pacing of this book is great too, not once did I feel like it was rushing for a conclusion, or dawdling to add more pages, it was done so well I wasn’t bored reading this once. The mystery element of this was great because I was intrigued from the beginning about the murder, but also didn’t manage to guess what was going to happen at the end.
So I definitely think this book is worth reading and I will follow the series as it goes on, I’m excited to see what Tabitha gets up to next. Please read it, it's going to be different than anything you've ever read before.
Reading this book made me crave ice cream with every new chapter, and I don’t even like ice cream! That’s how good this book is, it makes you want things you don’t even like.
Let me start by saying that I haven’t read the first book in this series, so I was worried I would go into this book not knowing any of the characters, but thankfully character backgrounds are fleshed out towards the beginning of this book so I immediately felt comfortable reading this. I will try to pick up the first book however, because reading Drowned Vanilla just made me more and more curious as to Tabitha’s adventure in the first book.
Okay now onto the book. Drowned Vanilla is a truly magical book. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did, I was worried it might be a bit too eccentric in a ‘trying too hard to be different’ kind of way, but this book balances all it’s elements perfectly. It has just the right amount of romance without overpowering the story or taking away from the plot, whilst also having enough crime that I wasn’t dissatisfied, and to top it off it added interesting elements like recipes and blog entries which kept the story fresh and engaging.
This book is set in Tasmania, which was really interesting to me because I do live in Tasmania and I’ve never read a fictional novel set here before so it was really exciting to read this and be surrounded by that sense of familiarity.
The characters are what really make this book special. They were all written with such care and given such distinctive voices, I was never bored or irritated reading them, even the characters I didn’t care for. Tabitha is definitely going on my list of favourite protagonists, she is intelligent and confident, but she is also flawed, and I couldn’t help fall in love with her as the book went on. I loved reading Stewart too, he’s a character I’m going to remember for a long time. I especially like that Stewart’s Scottish accent was written as it would have been spoken, it made him even more fun to read.
The pacing of this book is great too, not once did I feel like it was rushing for a conclusion, or dawdling to add more pages, it was done so well I wasn’t bored reading this once. The mystery element of this was great because I was intrigued from the beginning about the murder, but also didn’t manage to guess what was going to happen at the end.
So I definitely think this book is worth reading and I will follow the series as it goes on, I’m excited to see what Tabitha gets up to next. Please read it, it's going to be different than anything you've ever read before.