Review: A not-so-mysterious Mystery Box
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 6, 2014
The Mystery Boxby Eva PohlerOkay,  First, there may be spoilers here, so read at your risk.  Second, although this is on my threw-it-at-the-wall shelf, I did finish reading it, although it took a lot of determination to do so.Okay.  This book made me feel like I was back in one of my creative writing groups, reading/writing character sketches as a prelude to actually beginning a story.  I was initially attracted to the book simply because of its title, as I am a sucker for mysteries!  And, in the beginning, I was intrigued by this odd set up of a bored housewife becoming embroiled in a hated neighbor's life story.  However, somewhere around 67% of the way through the book (reading on a Kindle), I realized that I was well over half way done and still reading back story.  Voluminous, boring, unbelievable back story.  Now, I'm also a fantasy fan, so suspending reality in favor of following an unrealistic premise is easy for me.  Usually easy, but not so with this book.  Heavy, maudlin, breast-beating, tear-jerking, uneven and just plain awkward writing for over half the book. It was about then that I started thinking about just deleting the book from my device and moving on to something more interesting.  However, I decided to tough it out.In all fairness, once I got to about 80%, it did pick up.  The elements of the back story, which I still believe could have been about 50-75% shorter, began to come together; there is an interesting sequence of events which could either mean the main character and her family have made exactly the wrong decision or have made the only choice to be made; there is also a short, but truly exciting characters-in-mortal-danger section; and then on to the denouement.  I figure I really enjoyed the first 1/8th of the novel and perhaps the last 1/8th of it -- but could have skipped the rest and still known exactly how everyone got to where they were in the end.  And yes, figuring out the why and who the why was tied to was pretty darn easy.Also, in the first part of the book (I quit looking for errors once I started thinking about not finishing the book, so these are all from early on) there are some pretty obvious proofreading problems:At 418:  "I jealous of them and enamored of him."  No verb to be found.Then, at 766, the author thinks there was a "...Shaw of Iran."  <Big Sigh>An example of awkward phrasing is found at 941:  "Come in and have a seat." With black trousers, he wore a snug gray turtleneck.At 2792 are two problems:  "...I would surly starve as others of his victims had."I think I'd be angry if I starved, too, but I'm betting that's not the word she wanted to use.  Also, I think others probably should be other.I made my last note at 3064, where we have this:  "...Yvette listens to Mona's voice drone over the phone like a dying bird."  And yes, by this point I felt like the whole story was a definite drone!So, I finished the book.  There were certainly moments here and there that were interesting, but more often than not, I found the book to be the perfect sleep elixir, and I was seldom able to stay awake more than 15-20 minutes while reading it.So, no kudos from me on this one.  Because I was so excited to read it (authors take note:  your writing better live up to your title!) I walk away very disappointed.