Monday, February 16, 2015

Lost Book Club - "After All These Years" by Susan Isaacs and a note about Literrater





We're going to start with a confession: after about the first 150 pages I started skimming this book, pretty much until the end. Let's talk about the actual plot and then I will talk about why I disliked this book. Okiedoke? Okiedoke.

Rosie and her husband Richie are celebrating a big wedding anniversary. Literally minutes after the big bash that they throw has ended, Richie tells his wife that he's leaving her for a younger,more beautiful woman that he works with. Rosie is devastated. She's been with Richie when they were young and broke, they built a very successful company together and now she's getting pitched away without a second thought.

He moves out of their McMansion and their divorce proceedings turn contentious before too long. One night, Rosie wanders into her kitchen late at night to eat some of her feelings and she literally trips over her soon to be ex-husbands body. 

As the murder investigation proceeds it soon becomes apparent that Rosie is their one and only suspect and the cops are just waiting to put her away until the funeral is done. Rosie didn't do it (?), but  there's no evidence to prove anyone else was in the house that night. So she decides to take the (not) reasonable course of action; skip out of town, and try to solve this murder while on the run from the cops in Manhattan. (Library Educated does not condone or encourage this move).


So here's a couple of reasons that I think the book didn't jive with me:
-Despite all my best efforts, I still can't get into murder mysteries.
- I think that my age bracket wasn't the intended audience. I think maybe they were aiming for a more middle aged crowd.
-I felt like there was a lot of talk describing the different men's body hair. Which is weird and unappealing and strange.
- It was very early 90s. When she was describing her opulent mansion with the library that they never used I wanted to be like "Make sure you sell that bad boy before the bottom drops out and you can't sell it for a song". It just didn't age well in general.

So let's just call this a 2 out of 5 so I can be done talking about this one and move on in my book life! :)


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What does this have to do with LOST?: Well lot's of mystery and a lot of people dying on LOST so I think that's what I'm going to go with here!

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Does anyone else use Literrater? It's a site where you rate books using kind of a sliding scale for different categories like horror, violence, gore, pacing, etc. I think it was basically a way for people to find books that were age appropriate. They had a rewards program that after you earned so many points you could get a $25 amazon gift card. I figured it was probably a scam, but it wasn't. I actually earned two! I was waiting on my 3rd when I got an email that was sent from the staff to all of the people who were waiting for their points to be redeemed. The email basically said "Yeah... so the site has no funding and it didn't really take off like we thought it would. Also we had to spend a lot of time combating fraudulent reviews. So we're not going to be able to honor the rewards anymore".  $25 was probably too high of an incentive, that would motivate people to just copy and paste reviews from places like goodreads and amazon and try to pass them off as their own. I don't know if that was part of the fraud problem, but it's just a guess. I'm a little peeved about it because I had already spent the money "in my head" and frankly put a lot of time trying to write thoughtful helpful reviews. Oh well. Such is life!

Anyway, moral of the story is if you were thinking about getting started or have gotten started with literrater be aware that their rewards system is probably not coming back. There's more information on their site.

2 comments:

  1. that stinks about Literrater! I think I started a profile on there and added a couple of reviews but never did much with it. It's a cool concept, just really hard to manage I would guess.

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    Replies
    1. It is a bummer. I thought something was up because a month or two ago they completely dropped off social media, and I was like hmmm...that's probably not a good sign. Maybe they'll figure out some better fraud safe guards and funding and come back.

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