Book Review: A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3) by Maddie Day

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A Poisonous Pour (Cece Barton Mystery, #3)  by Maddie Day  opens with the city of Colinas, California celebrating Memorial Day weekend with various activities including a car show and picnic. While co-sponsoring a booth at the car show with local mechanic Josie Jarvin, Cece witnesses one of the attendees, Regan Greene, getting into multiple arguments with others. Aside from that, everything goes well. That is until the next morning when the town finds out that Regan is dead, and it looks like she was murdered. With multiple people having motives, Cece utilizes her amateur sleuthing skills to find out who actually committed the dirty deed. I was approved for and received a digital copy of an Advanced Readers Copy (ARC) of A Poisonous Pour by Maddie Day from NetGalley and Kensington Publishing. A huge thank you goes out to both for providing me a copy for free in exchange for my honest opinion. Maddie Day's Cece Barton series has become one of my favorite cozy mystery series, an...
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Book Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

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Book Club Selection - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell opens in 1850 with Adam Ewing, a notary, is traveling home to California on a ship. Then, in 1931, Robert Frobisher, a composer, orchestrates a way into a sickly maestro's home. After that in the 1970's, Luisa Rey, a journalist stumbles across a story that threatens her life. Present Day, a Korean super state has overtaken England. Post-apocalyptic Iron Age, the last days of Earth on Hawaii. Then, we go back in time in reverse order, finding that all the characters are connected and intertwined.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was a book selection for the first book club I ever joined. It isn't a book that I would've ever picked up to read on my own. I loved the concept of the story when I read the synopsis and was looking forward to reading it.

Typically, I don't mind when a book jumps from one time period to the next, but with Cloud Atlas I did mind. It took away from the overall story line and made it very choppy. It felt like five distinct short stories, not a cohesive story. The only two story lines that I somewhat enjoyed were the stories of Robert Frobisher and Luisa Rey, but by the time we got to finish their stories, I had to go back and reread the first half of their story because I had forgotten some of the small details.

Another thing I disliked about Cloud Atlas was the post-apocalyptic story line wrote words like they might have been spelled before human kind became a civilized, educated society . . . the spelling of words made it difficult to get through.

There are so few books that I can say that I disliked reading, but Cloud Atlas is one of those books. I felt like David Mitchell was trying to force a moral story down my throat to teach me of what could happen in the future if we didn't heed the mistakes of the past. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind stories that have a moral to teach, but I just wasn't in the mood for this type of story. I gave it one star out of five stars.

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