Review: Dizzy Izzy
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2010
This story started off well - lots of mystery, a strange character called Feathers (Feathers?) who is a resident in the block of flats where Izzy and her son go to live, the mysterious woods and spooky  writing on the wall. It soon went downhill for me. Izzy just never stops talking. It seems that everything that pops into her head has to be written out. Sometimes I felt as though I was an observer of a real life situation and being forced to listen to the banal, half-heard conversation of strangers.  She just jabbers on and you soon realize that nothing she says means much. It would probably work better if you had some idea of the emotions Izzy, and the other characters, were feeling. You never quite know. Izzy cries a lot, she gets drunk when any sensible person would figure they would need all their wits, she goes on crying jags, loses her temper, slams things around but you are never completely sure just why.  She vacillates between spunky and helpless within the space of five minutes. I found myself getting thoroughly irritated by her.I could not warm to any of the characters in this story. Izzy was annoying, her son was odd and seemed to mostly hover in the background and Feathers - well he just seemed like an aged hippy who may or may not be a little loopy.  He didn't get my heart beating.  He didn't do a whole lot for Izzy either. Their romance was luke-warm at best.Izzy is pretty stupid. She is told in so many different ways to keep away from the woods but for some reason, she refuses to believe.  Ok, the story needed her to go into the woods and it was a build up in suspense but why then, does she show healthy scepticism about the woods and yet on several occasions later in the story, when something really outstandingly weird happens, she just accepts it?  Despite the scary, scary wood and her idiocy in stirring up the creature in there, as soon as something bad happens her first thoughts were to blame someone else entirely and, to make it even more confusing, she was right.There are a few typos/spelling errors in this book. The spelling of 'neanderthal' was inspired - I am not sure if it was a case of reversing letters or if the author really thought it was spelt that way - and there were several instances of 'breath' instead of 'breathe'.All in all, it was not a waste of my 99c. The story skipped along and there were parts where I felt quite frightened. The magic in the story was unusual enough to be interesting.  I just would have liked it to have had more impact on the outcome of the story.