lapetitepritt posted: " Hello, bookworms! Happy Saturday, I hope you are having a relaxing weekend. As this article is being published (God bless the scheduling option on Wordpress), I am actually at school learning how to use Excel in publishing, yay. On Monday I also h"
Happy Saturday, I hope you are having a relaxing weekend. As this article is being published (God bless the scheduling option on WordPress), I am actually at school learning how to use Excel in publishing, yay. On Monday I also have an exam and I have some exercises due for the rest of the week, so I am actually going to have a really busy weekend.
Anyways, today I am here with the rant review I had promised you in my last article. I don't know what it's going on with this mystery series, but it's been three months since Vitt and I read a mystery we actually enjoyed. The last one was They Never Learn by Layne Fargo back in November and maybe it was just so good it jinxed all future reads for us. I had such high hopes for our February title, Miss Aldrige Regrets by Louise Hare, but as you can already tell, it was a huge disappointment for both me and Vitt. It's actually an e-ARC we got through Netgalley, so it's twice as sad that we ended up hating it.
Disclaimer I received an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley; this does not affect my rating nor my opinions in any way. Everything you'll find in this review is what I actually think and it wasn't influenced by anyone. Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read and review this book!
About the book Title: Miss Aldridge Regrets Author: Louise Hare Publisher: Berkley Books Publication date: 28 April 2022 Pages: 368
Plot, as stated on Goodreads The glittering RMS Queen Mary. A nightclub singer on the run. An aristocratic family with secrets worth killing for.
London, 1936. Lena Aldridge wonders if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn't worked out. Instead, she's stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho, and her married lover has just left her. But Lena has always had a complicated life, one shrouded in mystery as a mixed-race girl passing for white in a city unforgiving of her true racial heritage.
She's feeling utterly hopeless until a stranger offers her the chance of a lifetime: a starring role on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York. After a murder at the club, the timing couldn't be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But death follows her onboard when an obscenely wealthy family draws her into their fold just as one among them is killed in a chillingly familiar way. As Lena navigates the Abernathy's increasingly bizarre family dynamic, she realizes that her greatest performance won't be for an audience, but for her life.
My rating: 1 out of 5 stars
Review
Eh… I really hated everything about this book except one (1) thing. Let's start from the only good thing, shall we? I liked having a mixed race white passing protagonist in a mystery set in the 1930s, but that's where it ends. I cannot say anything good about this book.
Since they are usually what influences my rating the most, let's talk about the characters first. The main character, Lena, was so stupid I wanted to scream at her. Literally scream at her to wake up. I don't care that the book was set in the 1930s, she had a kind of life up untile the point where the book starts that you'd think she would know how to use her brain. Apparently not, and it was so damn frustrating reading from her point of view. Especially since it was obvious she shouldn't have trusted some people she barely knew. All the other characters were mostly useless and one dimensional, beside their name and like one characteristic each, they didn't have anything that helped you make them apart. The villains — if you could call them villains — were laughable. Both the mystery on land that the one at sea were so boring and obvious, and the characters did not help make them interesting at all.
Speaking of which, this book is almost 400 pages long at it has multiple "mysteries" to solve, but really… Nothing happens for most of it. We are just following the dumbest woman ever wandering on a cruise ship asking herself "Who could it be?" and not seeing the plain truth.
The pacing is also wrong, I don't know what the editor was thinking when they said yes, this is good, no need to change anything. Really, I had to read multiple useless description of what the MC was eating and drinking or how she was dressed and the character + mystery building were practically non-existent. I understand it's historical fiction and probably the author wanted to set the tone, but it was too much tone and too little actual substance.
Moreover, it was clear she was trying to emulate Miss Agatha Christie, and she also mentioned her novels once or twice, but I really believe she did not accomplish the goal. I also think this book does not add anything to the mystery genre in general, but maybe I am being to harsh. I don't know, it was just a huge disappointment…
To make things worse, I think the setting was completely underused. I usually love mysteries set on cruise ships or trains, because they have the feeling of a locked-room mystery, but with a little more scope for the investigation. Some of my all times favourite mysteries are set on ships or trains and Agatha Christie herself was a master at writing them. There's a long tradition of this subgenre of mystery and Miss Aldridge Regrets was just not it. To think of all the things the author could have done with a setting such as the RMS Queen Mary, it makes me keen on picking up a pen and rewriting the whole book.
If all this wasn't enough, the writing style was also boring. Aside from the useless descriptions mentioned above, the dialogues were cringy and 100% unbelievable. There's one particular scene — I cannot say much, because it's spoiler — where a character tells something huge to our dear Lena and the whole thing is so badly written I actually had to stop and send a rant audio to Vitt, because it was so dumb. I hated it.
You'd think I had finished, but no. There are three more things which I found extremely annoying: the first one is that the two main mysteries were linked, but the link was once again so dumb and unbelievable it made me roll my eyes; the second one is also due to this fact and it's that the motive of the murderer was stupid and not well explained at all. The third and last one is that there was a romance subplot that didn't add anything to the main plot, and was also instalove-y. Did we need it? I think not.
So, please avoid this book. It's not problematic per se (even if there was a bit of slut shaming in my opinion; I know it was set in the 1930s, but some comments could be avoided), but I believe it's not worth your time. Don't be fooled by the cover, don't make my same mistake, and skip on this one. There are plenty of better titles to read, as far as I am concerned, and it's not fundamental that you read this one. If you want a good mystery set on a ship, do yourself a favour and read Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.
Finally, we reached the end of this looooong rant. Thank you for reading my review, I'll see you soon with a very cute book tag and at the end of the month with the follow up to my TBR made of BookTube favourite books of 2021!
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