Review: I felt deprived of a good book.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 16, 2013
***I received this book in exchange for an honest review***This book definitely started out with a punch to get your attention and suck you in. It brought back some of my own issues from high school that I could really go without reliving. Although the story deals with several different issues, it felt like it was lacking in really telling us what Zar was going through. We saw a couple of scenes, how she felt about it, but we don't really know the extreme of what happened to her which left me feeling a little robbed. The majority of the book was my secret, my secret. I got to a point where the dragging out of the secret became too much and began to turn me off of the book. By the time I learned her secret I was like that was it? I know kids are cruel, but I'm shocked they were that mean over something like that. I question that. I really like Loudon and how strong he was. The connection between them was great. There was a couple of times he was acting like he wasn't going to see her anymore and then they would get together like nothing they said happened, but looking back I think I did that as a teenage too lol. Loudon drawing Zar out of her shell was done well. It seems all it took was the right person to help her. How her parents didn't see her over night transformation is beyond me. They seem completely detached as parents and stuck in their own white picket fence dream. I was waiting for Zoe to come home one day saying things to Zar and she did. You can't hide things like that from kids in school. I understand the premise of the book, but I think it would've made a bigger impact had it been a novella because it was drawn out for so long without the interaction the book was based on. When a story is drawn out, that impact you are going for is just lost and it lost my interest in the process. The ending wasn't what I expected and I closed the book feeling like I was deprived of what could've been a really great story. Taking that into consideration, the intended target audience, and the errors in the book I was sad I had to rate this book 3 stars.