Sunday, 15 March 2020

Jennifer Stone - Cherry Slice


Rating: 2/5

Review
Not really for me

I’m afraid I didn’t get on with Cherry Slice. It’s well enough written but I found it slow, rather derivative and not as funny as it tries to be.

Cherry Hinton was a local journalist but after a humiliating public failure on a TV reality show while working undercover is now working in her parents’ cake shop in a small Essex town. She is asked to look into the apparently cut-and-dried murder of a contestant on another reality show which was filmed on live TV.

It’s a cosy murder mystery used as a vehicle for satirising modern mores: behaviour on Twitter, gutter journalism, cheap and tawdry “reality” TV shows and so on. Although it was mildly amusing in parts, it didn’t really work for me; the satire wasn’t very new, very little actually happened for quite a long time and the humour didn’t really amuse. For example, a lot of people (including the title character), are given manes which are adaptations or puns on place names like Jacob Stow, Leon Solent, Jodrell Banks (oh, come on!) and so on, which I just found annoying, I’m afraid.

I’m sorry to say that I gave up in the end. Several other reviewers have enjoyed this, but I’m afraid it wasn’t for me.

(Mt thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

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