Hello and happy Monday. Yes, today is a holiday in Colombia and, as you might have noticed, we have many of those here. That gives me the chance to do more of what I enjoy while getting ready for the weeks ahead, and of course, it gives me the chance to finish books I’ve been reading for nearly a month like Just a Fika by Beck Erixson. I’d like to thank the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the chance to read and review this book.

Let me start out by saying that this review will probably be hidden somewhere because, as I noticed a few minutes ago, only four and five-star reviews are featured on the first page even though the average rating for this book on NetGalley is three stars. I feel like that is disingenuous for potential readers and reviewers. I will not, as you might’ve guessed by now, give this book four or five stars.

It usually takes me two or three days to go through a book when I’m not busy, and around a week when I am. It took me three weeks (probably more) to read this 240-page novel because it literally would put me to sleep. As I was reading it, the narrative style reminded me of how my young students would tell a story and start adding these elements as they went either because they remembered them halfway through, because they realized their story wasn’t making any sense and they needed to fix it, or just because.

We had this woman who goes back to the town where her family has lived for hundreds of years to a house that just exists for women from said family to live in every few years, but we don’t know, at least at first, why she’s there. When we hit the 200-page mark or so we’re told that her actual place was undergoing renovations, but that is not something that is mentioned throughout the novel. It’s like she moved to this other place and forgot everything about where she actually lived. The ghost of her dead grandmother lives in the house, along with other ghosts that can be seen by some people sometimes, and the grandmother’s goal is to set the main character up with one of the men from the town (not a random guy, she knows who he is, but she won’t tell her granddaughter, for some reason).

The plot was all over the place and I was never interested enough to actually care how everything got sorted out, which did, but in such a rushed and cheesy and ultimately predictable way that even when I was a few pages away from the end I asked myself why I’d insisted on finishing this book. But I did, and now I can move on to bigger and better adventures.