Review Detail

My Review: Awhile back I requested this book to review since I read the book synopsis and I really liked the overall premise of the story. If you know me, then you know I really like to read books that deal with tougher themes and stories most authors don’t like to deal with. So, basically the book had some promise. Lucky for me, the publisher agreed to let me do a full review.

Unfortunately, this will be a small review. In short, when I finished reading this book, I realized I didn’t care for it at all. It isn’t my cup of tea, per say.

Let me start by saying that this is a very short book in length, at just 200 pages. To really be able to capture all of the heavy emotions of the four main characters, the book needed to be more in depth then what it was. It lacked characterization. I had a really difficult time trying to connect with any of the characters because the author didn’t give them enough room to really spread their wings and become great characters that have each an individual voice. It’s really tough to explain, but the best way to describe it is that if the author didn’t label which character was speaking, I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between all of them.

I also had an issue with the basic setup of this book. The story flip-flops between each of the characters and their points of view. I usually don’t have a problem with this sort of thing. Take Ellen Hopkin’s books for example. She deals with tough issues and she typically has a storyline that is viewed from multiple characters…but she is able to pull it off well. I think where Ashley Sanders went wrong was adding too many characters instead of just focusing on one character. Once again, the book is too short to really give each of the characters justice. In this book, it was just too confusing and sometimes throughout the book I was completely lost as to what exactly was going on.

Final Thoughts: I’m not too sure I would give this book a recommendation. It’s one of those “enter at your own risk” types of book. I’m sure some people will really like it, but it wasn’t for me. I think the author should use this book as a learning experience to become a better author. I do so a lot of potential and I really hope that his next book will be better than his first.