Ingrid solves a murder mystery while auditioning to be Alice in a theater play of “Alice in Wonderland”.

I did not enjoy this book. There is profanity, under-age drinking, under-age gun usage, and domestic violence. Ugh.

The main character, Ingrid, wants to be like Sherlock Holmes and trains herself to notice every detail around her. So the reader has to slog through paragraph after paragraph of the details of every scene. We have to read what people are wearing, what the building looks like, what expressions people have, how they crinkle their eyes, how they hold their coffee cup, how they smell and move and talk. It is exhausting! A few details can be really powerful to set a scene, but it was just too much, and it was ALL the time.

And there is some profanity which I did not like. This is a middle-grade novel! The main character is in seventh grade. Why would there be profanity included in a book for young people? This baffles me, and I did not appreciate it.

There is also a scene where Ingrid practices shooting a gun at some targets with her grandfather even though she knows her mother disapproves of her using a gun. Why would she go behind her mother’s back and disobey her about such a major issue like using a weapon? I did not like what that said about Ingrid’s character.

Then Ingrid’s big brother comes home late one night and he has been drinking. He manages to hide it from his parents, but Ingrid notices the smell of alcohol. He is only fifteen or sixteen, I think. Ugh. This horrible book.

The final straw was a scene where Ingrid says something snarky (but not really mean) to her big brother, and he hits her. He just hits her right in the face and yells at her and storms out of the room. I don’t know what kind of nasty book this is, but I DNF’d it right then.

I’m done with this hateful book. I read up through page 105, and Ingrid had still not auditioned for the play, one of the main plot points that I cared about in this book. At that point in the story, she has only just found out when the auditions will be held. Way to drag out the main story line.

Everything in this book is horrible.