I was drawn in. Her descriptions of food and the process of cooking were absolute perfection. I was annoyed that somehow she seemed to be acknowledging race and inequality, but still made the white people the central characters and the problems of exploitation a side story to move along the plots of those white people. She also tended toward extremely stereotypical representations of the people of color. We meet, for example, a table of Jamaicans whose only significant characteristic is that they're all high. So, I had these and some other qualms, but I was still IN the story. I had no idea where it was going to go, so I was invested. And then that ending happened. I had been debating whether this was a 3 or 4 star book until the end, at which point it became a 2 that I bumped to 3 for at least tricking me into investment through the rest of the story.