Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books, and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, and in that way it was a huge disappointment. I expected something funny, clever, and unique, and this wasn’t really any of those things. In fact, almost immediately I had a really bad reaction to this book and almost DNFed it because I was disliking the writing style, but I was buddy reading with my friend Paula, and she talked me down a bit and I gave it more of a chance. My expectations at a more reasonable level, this was a fine read. Not bad, but not great either. I hated the characters and I still didn’t like the writing style, but the mystery was entertaining, and I loved all the descriptions of food and the Italian setting. The meta elements weren’t as fun as I think the author thought they would be.
Elizabeth Evans does the audio narration, and she’s great as always. But the audiobook production team made the terrible decision to have Elizabeth Evans just narrate the book without making note when she was reading a footnote*, and as a result I have almost no idea what was text and what was a footnote. I’ve read audiobooks before where there’s like a ding, or the narrator literally says like “Footnote 3” or something. And that definitely needed to happen here. (I cannot speak to how the footnotes played out in hard copy or e-book formats. Apparently there were A LOT of them.)
I probably won’t continue in the series, but I’m not mad I read it.