Welcome back, this week I can’t promise as good a review as I have given in the past. However I want to make it clear that I believe the things I’m not a fan of in this book are things that I don’t believe would worry a teenager or young adult as they don’t have the same life experiences I have had.
So I met the author at the Clunes Booktown Festival a few weeks ago and he told me a little bit about this story. What he told me is that this book follows 2 women in two different times in history; one in the Salem Witch Trials and another in modern day Melbourne. The thing they have in common is that they can both see the future. This bugged me for the rest of the day until I went back and bought a copy of the book.
After reading it I’m a little disappointed. The book only has one out of every 4 chapters (roughly) where we follow Mary during the Salem Witch Trials. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but if I’m told a book follows two people I expect it to be closer to a 50:50 split in terms of page time for each character. To start off with I thought we’d be spending time following both of them and I was looking forward to discovering how they are connected, other than the fact that they both see the future. And I was left hanging. So unless this is explained in the second book don’t expect any answers on this front.
As I began the book I noticed that the style of writing was quite simplistic and not as mature as most of the books I read these days. I’m gona take a guess and say I didn’t really like this because I’m maturing and growing up. And therefore my tastes in how my books are written have matured and grown as I have. Because of this I just couldn’t fall in love with this book as much as I wanted to. And I gota say I really wanted to, coz this idea is amazing!
The other thing that really started to irk me towards the end of the book was how the author judged those that aren’t fortunate enough to have clean, safe and stable jobs. I’m sure most people don’t think well of drug users and prostitutes. However that doesn’t mean that they deserve our judgement, derision or appalling treatment just because they don’t work a nice clean “respectable” job that actively contributes to society in a positive way. The work I do is often seen in a negative light by many people even though how we do it is completely different to most companies. We have changed how we operate by doing a lot of training and work to listen to our customer’s and understand their situations better. Because of this I can’t enjoy reading about someone actively passing judgement on someone else without understanding how or why they are in the situation they are in.
So although there were aspects of this story and how it’s written that I don’t like. The story itself is great, and I can see the development of the character happening. I feel like if I pushed ahead and read the second book I wouldn’t be quite as disappointed. But if you go into the book expecting a level of writing aimed more at a teenager or young adult I don’t think you will have any issues with this book.
Next week I will be releasing a surprise post rather than letting you know what it will be in advance. So look forward to it!
Finally, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed reading this weeks post.
