Review: Remedy by Alex Hall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Horse rating: 🐴🐴🐴🐴🐴 of 5 horses
Overall, I would say this was fine. There were some better parts, and some not so good parts, and it was generally readable.
The better parts:
• I liked having a nonbinary MC in Reed - I’m not sure I’ve read a romance with someone using they/them pronouns, and I was happy to see that. I also liked them as a character.
• I loved the horse details. So much horse. Beautifully described, both as a background setting and as integral to the plot and characters.
• The family all had distinct personalities, and played off each other well in a believable family dynamic. I never like the “he’s just got a temper/can’t control it” excuse for the father, but it is a character trait that way. So I’ll be cranky but not because of the writing.
• The writing was generally solid.
The not so good parts:
• Peter Griffin. The MC is named Peter Griffin. I had to skip all the sex scenes because I can only imagine Family Guy and that’s just not my kink
• Also in the name category - there’s secondary characters named Bule Dotty and Jolene Dotty (14 year old girl). I just…is this a Cracker Barrel waiting list parody? Bule is also a buffalo wrangling insurance agent.
• Certain repetitiveness - Peter’s eyes are described as being like Lake Baikal at least ten times. This is about eight time too many. Reed is described as The Russian way too much as well. I get it, he’s Russian, move on.
•The weird plots - there was too much going on in my opinion. We have (1) Peters injury and him coming to terms with no longer competing, and facing a massive life change; (2) Reed and his mafia; and (3) evil abusive ex husband with sabotage. It’s a lot. It would have been better to pare this down, because it didn’t play well together. I personally would have liked more focus on Peter coming to terms with his injury/hurt-comfort with Reed/career changes etc because it was very sweet seeing Reed’s caretaking of everyone.
I didn’t really feel the romance by the end either, likely because the development of that was sidelined a bit by the dual mystery plots.
• The ending…It felt like everything was wrapped up very abruptly in about three pages, which was a bit frustrating. I guess it’s an ongoing series (along with the clumsily set up romances for the siblings) and was maybe implied there’s more Linden content to come? But it was still mostly wrapped up. It left the book and series in a weird spot of resolved, and yet not.
Overall, this was a decent book. I think it tried to do too much, and suffered for it.
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