Brownies and Broomsticks by Bailey Cates
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I was hoping to have found another cute and worthwhile mystery series that included witches with the Magical Bakery Mystery series. Unfortunately, I will not continue this series, since it could not keep my interest.
It was a slow moving story that contained a lot of unnecessary details, which oddly enough were not explained properly so that the actual purpose of those descriptions seemed out of place, awkward and confusing.
I felt that the main character was only the vessel or object of moving the plot along. The author did not exert any effort to flesh her out and add some depth to her personality. I was unsure, if she was meant to represent a naive young woman or one, who possesses a sharp sense of humour. The secondary characters, one in particular, came across as unstable and inconsistent. At times I felt very uncomfortable reading of her actions and behaviour (it did not include anything inappropriate, it just felt odd and peculiar). Every other character felt perfectly created and one dimensional only to serve the purpose to move the plot along, without providing any believable interaction between characters.
The dialogue felt forced and unnatural and the overall narration came across as constrained, stumbling and stiff.
The murder mystery portion of this story made barely any sense and the “investigation” kept getting sidetracked by one or the other male character that seemed to be more important than figuring out “whodunnit”.
I could continue picking out every point that led this story to fall short of its promise as a cozy witch mystery; however, I have to admit that after having read the Wishcraft series, my expectations may have been unreasonably high.
I think overall this is a very quick, easy beach read that can certainly make the reader forget their surroundings.
