Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: a mystery

I think this story might have worked if it had been written in the third person. It takes a much better author than Golden to pull something like this off. In third person there would have been some opportunity (and real challenge) to draw the narrator in more detail, but as it is she comes off as papermache. There is never a deep emotion from her, everything happens on the surface. Of course a male author can write a female character well -- but not in this case. Golden took the convenient way out, and the result is stereotype that is (at worst) offensive and (at best) boring.