Serious Moonlight

by Jenn Bennett

[Leigha]

I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Birdie Lindberg and her new co-worker, Daniel Aoki, uncover a startling mystery in this ho-hum young adult contemporary romance.

If someone had told me I would be rating a Jenn Bennett contemporary romance with less than four stars, I would have laughed in your face. If someone told me I would be rating a book that consistently trots out references to the undeniably amazing The Thin Man films, I would have scoffed – SCOFFED – in scorn. And yet, here we are. HERE WE ARE.

This book did not work for me for two main reasons. First, I was issued an eARC of this novel from Edelweiss back in the fall. The formatting was atrocious, littered with typos and mutated sentence structure. Entire sentences would have

one

word

per

line.

I made a slow and terrible progress through it until the 40% mark. When I realize my experience of the read was directly bringing down the enjoyment of the read, I quit. The book became available on NetGalley this Spring, and I picked it up again. The formatting had been fixed, but the first 40% of the book bored me. *Le sigh*

Secondly, it’s a mystery. It has reference to many mysteries, spoofing off well-know motifs. I do not enjoy mysteries. I enjoy The Thin Man series because of the amazing writing and casting of Nick and Nora Charles. The mystery themselves do not interest me. When I am reading a mystery, I need the characters to be undeniably charismatic to hold my attention. Unfortunately, I found Birdie and Daniel to be bland and their stories to be uninteresting.

I think this truly falls in the “it’s me, not you” category. I would urge readers to give it a shot if you enjoy mysteries or you have enjoyed Jenn Bennett’s work in the past.

tl;dr A poorly formatted eARC and the mystery motif made me feel pretty disinterested in this novel.