Book:  Penumbra

Author:  Carolyn Haines 

Grade:  C- 

Recommended to:  People who want to be bored whilst reading. 

Oh Boy.  Prepare yourselves.  This review is going to be scathing.  I didn't like this book at all.  I was not impressed by the writing, the alleged "depth" of the characters, or the story.   It got a C- because it had potential, but this author in no way lived up to the potential of the story.

This story is about a little girl that gets kidnapped and her mother who is brutally beaten and raped.  The town sheriff has to solve the mystery.  Sounds good right?  Right, except for the writing and the dialogue, and all of the horrible distracting side stories.  That is why this story had potential. 

The dialogue was terrible. I didn't believe that any of the characters would make the statements they made.  This author suffered from a severe lack of perception about actual people, the people in the book made extremely unwieldy statements that were unrealistic. 

The author also chose to describe every detail of every person's thought process in short choppy sentences .  Ahhh, shoot me now.  I skimmed through large portions of this book because I just didn't care about any of the story line.  There was nothing compelling about a black woman who could have passed as white.   Again, potential. But, no delivery.

The full of potential story line I just described?  That became a side story to some weird sexual scenes and tension that was completely irrelevant.  gag.

It felt like this book was written by a 10th grader who got an assignment for class and was lucky enough to be published.  I will never again waste my time reading something my Haines.  This book fell flat,  I do not recommend it unless you just enjoy swiping your finger across your kindle without reading any of the words.

Happy Reading!