This book is SO CLOSE to being very good. It almost makes me angry.

It has this lovely mixture of magic, whimsy, tragedy, and folksy-small-town. The atmosphere is lovely-- full of southern heat and lots of pie. The main characters are decent, but the secondary characters are both dynamic and flat: they behave in strange ways which should add depth but isn't fleshed out enough and instead feels incoherent. But it's such a pleasure to read, I didn't much mind a few stale characters.

What really got me was the ending. It was abrupt, with very little resolution. I read it as an ebook, and I checked several times to see if there was a chapter I'd missed. It just--- stops. There's no real denoument, but not in the artsy french-film way, just in a jarring, bizarre way that leaves me feeling like the author just got bored of writing this book and wanted to move onto something else. Which is such a shame, because she laid such a lovely foundation! I wanted that follow through!

I still give it 4 stars because the bulk of the book is excellent, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes cozy mysteries or rural romances.