Trespassing by Brandi Reeds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this novel is like walking into the nearest Golden Corral buffet and knowingly wrecking havoc on your stomach. You get a little bit of everything on your plate - and whether or not you want the questionable looking yellow sludge "pudding" at the end of the line - you're eating it. Sure, there's a decent amount of edible, and even satisfying, components woven in, but there is also a lot of crap that should be immediately scraped off into the nearest trashcan.

First and foremost, immediately dump the whole Elizabella / Nini plotline into the bin labeled "toxic waste" because that is exactly what this is. Not only was it annoying in how it was written, but it had one of the most disappointing pay offs in recent memory. At first, the reader is led to believe this might take on a supernatural angle, which felt clever and eerie (I oddly loved that Nini supposedly lived in Bella's hair - it was just random enough to be creepy .. or so I thought..), but it ended up falling so flat that it actually became concave. And, come on, we are supposed to believe that a three year old can accurately draw pictures of a location she traveled to ONCE, and remember, in detail, interactions she had with child she met ONCE.

The missing husband who may or may not have been a philandering cheater, double life leading con man with illegal affiliations and a secret agent style agenda was a bit too far fetched to grasp onto. So was the whole farce of an investigation into his disappearance - the cops assigned to this case were somehow simultaneously the most incompetent, yet most informed force on the block. And for the love of God, if you listened to this on Audible as I did, please tell me you were also considering puncturing your eardrums with an ice pick anytime the police officer from Wisconsin spoke, in what will go down in history as the most grating accent I have ever witnessed? The narrator should spend 25 to life in a Wisconsin prison for that monstrosity of an impression.

The IVF aspect could have worked, even though it was mentioned way more than necessary ("Did I tell you that I am a fertility patient? Oh I already did forty two times?"), especially after the bombshell involving this element was dropped, which honestly was very unexpected and original. But again, it was just too much in conjunction with everything else that was going on in this narrative.

I am inclined to believe that the author had quite a few creative, thought provoking, and at times, fresh ideas, but they would have benefited by being wholly fleshed out in SEPARATE novels. Trying to cram fifteen distinctly different subplots into the overall main plot of the story didn't do anyone any favors here. What we are left with is a Smorgasbord of under cooked concepts and far, far too many loose ends.

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