Holly Jolly Readlist Book 1 Review

 Title - Sugar & Sliced - Maple Lane Series #.5

Author - C.A. Phipps

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spice 🌶 - 0

scare 😱 - 1.25

plot 📖 - 4

characters 🧍- 4

stars ⭐ - 4

 

“It’s no one’s business but yours, sweetheart. The people who care about you know you’ve been unhappy, and they only want what’s best for you in the future, so pay the busybodies and troublemakers no mind.”

Cozy mysteries - very interesting concept. On one page you have a girl talking to her cat about a baking competition, the next you are hearing about petechial hemorrhaging. I'm on the fence about whether I jive with this sub-genre. The book was a great change of pace from a lot of gorey and thrilling books nowadays but still has the mystery aspect that keeps you going.
My issue is that the plotlines and character traits seemed very juvenile at times. I think this is more of a critique of the genre as a whole and not the author. Because you don't have the bite that most mystery thrillers have the book can sway to the cheesy side easily.

Baking is a large part of this book and I enjoyed the detailed descriptions of Maddie's cooking. I had not read a book with that before and I found it very entertaining. Probably one of my favorite elements of the whole book.

I am not sure how old Maddie is but this book reads like she's 18/19, which I have a feeling she is not. She makes some really dumb choices in this book. Like REALLY dumb. Also, the boyfriend plotline was pull your hair out frustrating. There is a possible love interest introduced in the book and then it just never gets brought up again after that chapter. This could have been left open-ended because it is a series, I'm not sure. Maddie gets swept up simultaneously in two completely unrelated crimes and that's a lot for a ~150-page book. That and the ending was really all over the place. Phipps was trying to connect everything and tie it with a bow when it had no business being connected in the first place.

Since this was a prequel to a series that I have not read, and the prequel was released more than 3 years after the first book I have a feeling I am missing some context so please take my review with a grain of salt. I purchased this book on "Stuff Your Kindle Day" on Amazon and did not realize it was a prequel. I plan on continuing the series as the first half of the book was genuinely very good, it just lost me in the last half.

❤ Les

PS
For all my Christmas book lovers, I would not consider the a "Christmas book". It is set near Christmas and the holiday is brought up in the epilogue, but that is it.

View my review on Goodreads here.

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