A Review of 'All That She Can See' by Carrie Hope Fletcher

"Feelings are part of life-- feelings are life.  If you take away what people feel, you take away anything meaningful.  Wanting to diminish the evil in this world is a good cause, one I have fought for the majority of my life, but not like this...

Cherry has a hidden talent.  She can see things other people can't and she decided a long time ago to use this skill to help others.  As far as the rest of the town is concerned she's simply the kind-hearted young woman who runs the local bakery, but in private she uses her gift to add something special to her cakes so that after just one mouthful the townspeople start to feel better about their lives.  They don't know why they're drawn to Cherry's bakery-- they just know that they're safe there and that's how Cherry likes it.  She can help them in secret and no one will ever need to know the truth behind her gift.

And then Chase arrives in town and threatens to undo all the good Cherry has done.  Because it turns out she's not the only one who can see what she sees...

A story of love, food, and a little bit of magic All That She Can See is an enchanting and beautiful novel that's guaranteed to be the most magical story you'll read all year."

I follow Carrie on YouTube, so when she announced that she was releasing her second fiction book, I was excited.  It's not that I loved her last book On the Other Side, but I saw potential in it, so I preordered this one.

This is another book that had mixed reviews.  I thought that this book showed improvement over her last novel.  The name combinations kind of drive me nuts, but I thought overall this story had an interesting concept behind it.  Cherry is a talented baker and she uses this odd bit of magic to infuse different foods with positive feelings in order to help people feel better.  Not to make everyone happy all the time, but cheer people up, balance their emotions.  So she spends a few months to a few years in different towns depending on how downtrodden to residents of the new place she's living in feel.  The more downtrodden, the longer she stays because there's a lot more work to do.  I thought this was a lovely thought.

Knowing the conditions that Carrie was writing this book in-- between rehearsals and performances, as she's an actress and has lately been in a few touring shows that keep her away from home-- several parts of this book felt rushed or incomplete.  And Carrie's books have a tendency to become kind of preachy... like, her characters feel so artificial at times.  They say things and it doesn't feel like they're delivering a genuine message like when she says something similar in her videos.

One part that I thought had potential but was missing something was the part about the Guild.  There is an organization that keeps tabs on people that can see emotions and especially if those people are messing with emotions using their abilities.  Cherry is caught by this group.  I feel like this group would have been better to read about if we were given some kind of clue earlier in the story, or if they showed up a bit more often.  Right now, it felt like it was tacked on at the end, like she needed a good way to end her story.

Overall, there is a definite improvement to this story over her last story and I did get some enjoyment out of it.  Carrie has another book coming out in... I believe July.  It's called When The Curtain Falls and I have preordered it, so I'm looking forward to reading it.  I'm a little worried that there will be similar issues that Carrie is being pulled in too many different directions to really pay this book the attention it deserves to make it a really great read.

I give 'All That She Can See':

Thanks for Reading!

--Jude