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A review by hemloc
Snow Falling by Jane Gloriana Villanueva
1.0
Two reasons to read Snow Falling:
1) I just found out that the book Jane wrote in Jane the Virgin had actually been written and couldn't resist. I love that they got someone to ghost write it and published it; it's a nice little treat for people who watched the show.
2) The sentences have a really nice flow, especially in the first couple of chapters. They come together in quite a soothing rhythm, which made me push through in spite of everything else.
Six drawbacks to Snow Falling:
1) The book reads like an awful romance novel, the kind of cliché romance novel that leads non-romance readers to assume the entire genre is like this. The writing is amateurish. The story is told instead of shown, there are a ton of adjectives and even more clichés. Everything Josephine does is mentioned even the mundane (standing behind a desk for hours, hurrying into another, cleaning...)
2) The italics narrator doesn't serve a purpose beyond poorly mimicking the show. All it does is point out things that have already been said or implied.
3) There's no character depth or evolution. There's also no chemistry. Anywhere. Everyone is so terribly in love, but there's no explanation for what draws them to the other.
4) The attempts at suspense and the crime genre fail because of poor writing and the switching POVs that reveal everything as soon as it happens and disclose everyone's motives.
5) The characters always voice exactly what they want and what they're feeling, which deprives the dialogue of any kind of tension and makes it unrealistic.
6) There are inconsistencies and/or poor sentence choices. Eg. Zara thinks Ronaldo doesn't look at all different from when she first saw him even though they met as children, Rake mentions that he and Luisa have the same mother, a woman who died, but later says his mother left.
1) I just found out that the book Jane wrote in Jane the Virgin had actually been written and couldn't resist. I love that they got someone to ghost write it and published it; it's a nice little treat for people who watched the show.
2) The sentences have a really nice flow, especially in the first couple of chapters. They come together in quite a soothing rhythm, which made me push through in spite of everything else.
Six drawbacks to Snow Falling:
1) The book reads like an awful romance novel, the kind of cliché romance novel that leads non-romance readers to assume the entire genre is like this. The writing is amateurish. The story is told instead of shown, there are a ton of adjectives and even more clichés. Everything Josephine does is mentioned even the mundane (standing behind a desk for hours, hurrying into another, cleaning...)
2) The italics narrator doesn't serve a purpose beyond poorly mimicking the show. All it does is point out things that have already been said or implied.
3) There's no character depth or evolution. There's also no chemistry. Anywhere. Everyone is so terribly in love, but there's no explanation for what draws them to the other.
4) The attempts at suspense and the crime genre fail because of poor writing and the switching POVs that reveal everything as soon as it happens and disclose everyone's motives.
5) The characters always voice exactly what they want and what they're feeling, which deprives the dialogue of any kind of tension and makes it unrealistic.
6) There are inconsistencies and/or poor sentence choices. Eg. Zara thinks Ronaldo doesn't look at all different from when she first saw him even though they met as children, Rake mentions that he and Luisa have the same mother, a woman who died, but later says his mother left.