A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams Book Review by Miranda Moses (Fraser) ISBN: 978-0-06-240495-4 A Certain Age is a book I didn't particularly care for overall, though I felt the ending was SLIGHTLY redeeming. Using a Goodread's rating system I would say it's 3 out of 5 stars. That's why I placed it under Honorable Mentions, but this book would be listed as: Historical Romance, Fiction, and possibly Mystery in bookstores and libraries. This is definitely an adult fiction novel with a lot of focus on adultery and adult relations. But I do have to say I love the time period it was set in- the 20's! I mean, flappers, women voting/ getting jobs, and all that glamorous stuff. To start with, it took almost 150 pages for the story to actually get interesting. The first 100 something were basically just about affairs. Apparently in the 20's everyone was having an affair, the husbands, the wives, hell even the mistresses had someone else! For me that was honestly so distasteful and hard to read. I know in the real world stuff like this actually happens, but it makes for a terribly boring and offsetting story. HOWEVER, the story begins with the promise of a murder mystery so I held on to see what that was all about. If you can get past the first 134 pages FOR SURE, it will start to get interesting. I must also mention that there are SO many character's I couldn't properly list them all because they all play important roles to the story. Secondly, I appreciated the murder mystery. We didn't jump right into a scene of death and gore, it was subtly played out. Every so many chapters there'd be a newspaper article discussing the court proceedings and evidence. So there is a lot of jumping back and forth in timelines. It took a while to figure out who the killer was, the victim, etc. Now, I can follow that kind of story but I've seen a lot of people complain that it was too hard to keep track of. I however enjoyed that aspect of the story. I also came to care dearly for the one character in the book and her transition from a naive sheltered 19 year old to a woman of the world with dreams and goals. In conclusion, I was very pleased with the ending and how the story ended up playing out. The mystery was good and hard to figure out since they kept so much of it hidden throughout the story. The adultery was hard to handle and follow but if you can get past that the story wasn't a total wash. For someone else this may be a dream story! And there is a sequel, "Coco Beach". There are also other stories that seem to be written off of this same universe. I'm half tempted to check them out even though I wasn't IN LOVE with this book. I think that should say something about the overall quality of the story. Anyways, read on my fellow bookworms, may we one day have Belle's library. And as always links to the author's pages can be found down below.
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hONORABLE MENTIONSThe point of this page is to give books a shout out without a full review. PRIMARILY because I have already previously reviewed books in the series. Archives
October 2020
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