Started: September 17, 2019
Finished: September 22, 2019
Rating: 1.5 stars
Summary (from Goodreads): Lennie always thought her uncles’ “important family legacy” was good old-fashioned bootlegging. Then she takes some of her uncles’ moonshine to Michaela Gordon’s annual house party, and finds out just how wrong she was. At the party, Lennie has everyone make a wish before drinking the shine—it’s tradition. She toasts to wishes for bat wings, for balls of steel, for the party to go on forever. Lennie even makes a wish of her own: to bring back her best friend, Dylan, who was murdered six months ago. The next morning gives Lennie a whole new understanding of the phrase be careful what you wish for—or in her case, be careful what wishes you grant. Because all those wishes Lennie raised a jar of shine to last night? They came true. Most of them came out bad. And once granted, a wish can’t be unmade.
So.
This book has been on my TBR for a loooooonnnnnngggg time. Since it came out in 2016. I had big hopes for it, especially because it’s a magical realism novel. Magical realism! What’s not to like about magical realism?
Turns out, there can be a lot of things to not like about magical realism.
This book was just ridiculous. There’s not really a better word for it. It started out like a suspenseful novel about a crime lord’s daughter, and then it suddenly…stopped being that.
Instead, it was like the author just threw together whatever plot elements she could think of and tried to make a cohesive story out of them. The different plot elements just didn’t work together. Lennie’s crime boss father storyline mixed with her (weird) romance with Smith mixed with the (totally unaddressed) storyline about turning her friend into a zombie just made for a mess of story.
Plus, everything was played so comedically. I love a good funny story. I may be more of a drama girl, but I can appreciate comedy when it’s well-placed and well-earned. But this book just felt…off. It was funny in places where it shouldn’t have been and the actual jokes fell verrryyy flat.
Finally, the characters.
UGH, these characters.
They were all so unlikable. Lennie was just annoying, Smith was overly violent, and every other character was just too dumb for their own good. There was not a single character who had any redeemable qualities for me. For a person who values character over anything else in a story, this was just the final straw on a big pile of things wrong with this story.
I rarely give books one star. I reserve one star for those books that I can’t find anything good to say about them. Down With the Shine has to be one of those books.
I feel kind of bad saying that, because I’ve met the author and she’s a wonderful person and I’ve taken a writing class from her. I have one more of her books on my TBR, so I’ll give her another chance. Maybe Down With the Shine just wasn’t for me.
If you want to give it a shot, please do. Maybe you’ll enjoy it a whole lot more than I did. Or maybe you’re just curious about a book in which I can’t find anything good to say.
Overall, this book just wasn’t my thing. It had all the potential to be, but everything in it fell flat. I was definitely disappointed by a book that I had had on my list since 2016, but now it’s on to the next book!
Thanks for reading!
Reviews by Hannah 