Mayhem at the Halloween Wedding; A Letter to the Luminous Deep

 

The second book in the Lazy Bones Bookshop series was disappointing. 

One year after her disastrous first literary festival, Bailey is back. Her second festival went much better, but now she's gearing up for her friend Raven's Halloween wedding (oh, and the potential love interest from the last book? Got a throwaway sentence about how they went on a few dates but it didn't work out). 

Raven and her fiancé, Emmett, are excited to have a Halloween themed wedding. Raven's parents are fully on board, but Emmett's parents aren't happy and would have preferred a more traditional wedding. So would Raven's sister, Harmony, who's a social media influence (ugh). Harmony is bitter that Raven picked her friend Ivy to be her maid of honor instead of her and is picking fights with everyone in the wedding party, including Bailey and Colby. But then again, so is Ivy. Honestly, none of these people were likable, even Raven sounded awful. And why is Colby antagonizing people? It felt like everyone was at a level 11 on the stress meter. Even the poor Boortio cart lady got dragged into it somehow. It was wild how everyone in a ten mile radius hated Ivy and Harmony. 

Suffice to say, when Ivy turns up dead there's a whole bunch of potential suspects. Bailey eventually figures it out and Raven has a nice Halloween themed wedding. 

Meanwhile, I fear these books are going to start to suffer from Miss Marple syndrome, where all these random murders keep happening in a quiet little town. In the first book, a police officer made a statement about how there hadn't been a murder in decades (or something like that) and now between these two books there have been at least five in a little over a year. I can't imagine those crime stats look great for their tourism agencies. 

It took me months to get through this one. I should have given up, honestly. It wasn't worth it. But I wanted to like it so badly. On paper, it sounded perfect. A fantasy set in a world where everything is underwater. 

It's told in epistolary format, a series of letters from one person to another. It starts out with E. (her full name is Erudite, she goes by E. No one blames her for this) hopefully writing to a scholar named Henerey Clel about the sights outside of her home, the famous Deep House her mother built. Henerey starts responding back, and before long a sweet sort of blossoming romance begins to form between the two very shy people. 

A seaquake destroys the Deep House while Henerey is visiting E., and both are presumed lost. While going through their siblings' belongings, Sophy (E.'s sister) and Vyerin, Henerey's brother, discover their correspondence and start trading letters, hoping to understand their siblings better and potentially figure out what might have happened to them. And that's where the book ends. 

So why didn't I like it? Well, the letters were extremely formal in tone and she used a lot of made up names and words, too many for me to keep track of. I have a hard time with names I can't pronounce (I had a lot of the same issues while reading "The Song of Ice and Fire" series). The pacing was absolutely glacial. Nothing happened. At all. For hundreds of pages. 

It's unfortunate, because I liked the premise but the execution was just not what I needed it to be in order to keep reading the rest of the series.