Review: Smart, Clever and Engaging
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 29, 2013
This is pretty short even for a short story, but it's long enough to give you a good sense of this series and of the heroine. Since it's currently a Kindle freebie you could think of it as a really nice, long self contained sample.This series seems to be much more of a school days/girlfriends/romance effort than a mystery series, but that's O.K. because it does what it does very well. Our heroine, Dani Spevak, is a talented ballet student at Mountain Shadows, a performing arts boarding school. She has friends, enemies, and frenemies. She has a sort of boyfriend, who is an actor on the verge of stardom. She has to stress about school, her boyfriend, her career, and her love life. Every now and then she stumbles across a crime victim and finds herself in the middle of another mystery.Dani is an engaging protagonist. She is a combination of talent, confidence and vulnerability. She is a reliable narrator with a self-deprecating sense of humor. She has not been created with a lot of quirks or with any burdensome backstory, so the whole impression she leaves is fresh and spirited.This very comfortable vibe is complemented by the fact that her friends are catty, but funny-catty and talking trash for laughs and giggles. Even the bad guy mean girls are "mean light", in that their comments aren't deep and don't score. I'm not a fan of the mean girls books where the emotional damage being handed out is uncomfortably real. Being a teen is hard enough without having to feel sorry for fictional victims.This light tone is sustained by the plots and the general flow of the action. For example, there is a running joke throughout the series based on the "Twilight" saga. Here, there is a "Midnight" hit series penned by Bethany Beyer, an alum of Dani's school. It involves a vampire, a werewolf and a girl. Dani's actor boyfriend has the Robert Pattinson role in the movie version that's being filmed. This setup allows for a running set of snarky comments about the whole "Twilight" phenomenon. It's sort of an inside joke between the author and her readers, which seems to me to set just the right tone for a book like this. In the same vein there are cutting edge pop culture references on practically every page, which makes the books practically a quiz on daily events for the alert reader. I don't know if that will help these books age well or will condemn them to early obsolescence, (will readers in 2023 know who Lady Gaga is/was?), but for now they add a lot of interest.So, they're light, fun, clever and engaging. Sometimes that's just what you want, and these books honestly deliver.Please note that I found this book while browsing Amazon Kindle freebies. I have no connection at all to the author or to the publisher of this book.