Newborn Pixie Cozy Mysteries - Books 1-3 by Willow MasonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Stop me if you've heard this one: (probably) twentysomething young woman whose life is a bit of a low-level disaster gets a mysterious inheritance from an elderly relative. It turns out she's magic, and the inheritance is magic, and other people want it, and there's an attractive policeman, and she can talk to her cat now, and there's a murder, and she helps to solve it.
Hundreds of people have written this story, to varying levels of quality. Tim Pratt, for example, has written it very well ( Heirs of Grace ), taking what's essentially fast food - made in bulk to a formula - and elevating it. This version by Willow Mason is appealing, with good-hearted, if not highly developed, characters and a New Zealand backdrop.
It sets out to do a particular thing, and it does that thing enjoyably enough that my first instinct was to give it four stars; but it's not really a four-star book, not for me. It follows a well-worn pattern without much deviation, and badly needs a copy editor.
At first, reading the sample, it seemed fairly smooth, with all the commas in the right place, so I bought it. I should have been warned, when I saw that the plural of Christmas was written as "Christmas's", that apostrophes were going to be a problem; almost all of them are either missing or in the wrong place, and that's true of a few commas as well. There are also vocabulary issues and a couple of dangling modifiers.
Overall, if this is the kind of thing you like, you will like this; it's typical of its genre in all the good ways as well as a couple of (for me) bad ways. As a bit of fun between more serious books, it worked OK for me. Bigger fans of the form will no doubt be more enthusiastic.
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