Review: In a Cottage In a Wood

In a Cottage In a Wood by Cass Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m the kind of person who will spend ages hunting out one more book for an offer if it means I get the extra book for a pound. It’s a problem I have, I admit. It results in multiple books sitting on the side until I can work myself around to reading them. Sometimes the book surprises me, other times not so much. In a Cottage In a Wood falls into the latter category. This book may have been my extra book for a pound, but hindsight has me wishing I had picked up a different book.

In a Cottage In a Wood comes across as a fun psychological thriller. I expected a quick book filled with twists and turns. Instead, what I was given was closer to a cosy mystery. It was the kind of story I half expected a cooking recipe to appear in. Okay, maybe that is a bit much – this one did attempt a spooky atmosphere whereas cooking recipe cosy mysteries are quite happy-go-lucky books – but you get my drift. This was not the kind of psychological thriller to keep you on the edge of your seat, rather it was a quick and cosy read with a little bit of mystery thrown in.

Although I’m a quick reader (I generally read a book a day, sometimes two books, unless I’m suffering from one of my migraines), I found this one took me much longer to read than it should have. It’s a short story, but I have read books almost three times the length in a shorter time period. This is because I kept putting the book down and doing other things. In fact, I read over five other books during the times I put this book down. You see, this one simply wasn’t sucking me in.

I was waiting for the gritty storyline to appear, or for things to edge towards spookiness. Neither happened. The closest we got to either was a somewhat atmospheric setting that erred towards what many consider stereotypically spooky – yet it wasn’t spooky at all. The book was much too focused upon the banalities for it to edge towards something more. We spend time focusing upon drama between individuals, we get lot of details regarding the everyday life of our main character, and we get plenty of general information about the characters introduced to us. This would have been fine, expect a lot was not relevant to the overall storyline. It felt like a way to bump up the work count, with the necessary way of making the story longer overlooked.

While the important details did make for an interesting story, it was lost under other information and predictability. I was constantly waiting for some big twist to come about, but everything was rather straightforward. There was no shock ending, no big twist, and I found myself pretty let down. It was interesting enough, but it could have been so much more had something more been added.

Overall, this wasn’t what I had hoped it would be. It’s a two-point-five-star rating rounded up to three stars, and another of my unfortunate bargain reads.

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