Review: Sequel missed hitting the mark - RETURN TO SENDER (Letters to Nowhere #2) by Julie Cross
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2014
If you follow my reviews, you know I gave the LETTERS TO NOWHERE eBook five stars and a long list of compliments. For that matter, I've since bought my niece a copy for her birthday. That first contemporary YA volume in the series jumped to "my all-time favorites" bookshelf, out of everything I've ever read.Sharing many life events and character traits in common with Karen, I "needed" to find out what happened next in her story. Call it a grief coping mechanism. I wasn't prepared for an eBook a bit less than one-fourth the length of the first of Julie Cross's LtN publications. And it has a few other problems.* The rhythm of the "short story" was off, because Karen isn't writing the diary-like letters any longer.* Cross stopped describing gymnastic routines in layman's terms, which leaves us truly watching the sport blindfolded (for those of us who didn't train in the discipline to know all of that "stuff").* Where I counted on Cross to provide character growth and plot...I just got what amounted to a few scenes from what should have been the next full-length novel- the Pan-American Games, cleaning out Karen's house, and adjusting plans for summer vacation.Two additions to this book caught my interest. First, the POV switches between Karen and Jordan offer a new depth to the prose. It's one thing to see Jordan from the outside, but it's another to know him from the inside. Second, I like that Karen is acting out. It would drive me crazy as a supervising adult, but I can watch her begin to explore the "real" world for the first time...from the safe distance of my Kindle app. Cross has paced the growing sexual maturity of Karen and Jordan as a couple quite well, and I look forward to find out how they handle all that will face them this summer and beyond.Julie Cross should have stuck to the novel format. Tracking character growth, timelines, and plot intricacies will be more difficult for the reader in the short form. We also tend to get cranky, when we have to keep paying $2.99 again and again. At the date I'm writing this, there's a marked difference between the number of people who reviewed this book for a free copy and those who actually paid for it. Hint? So, going on the premise that a book should tell a story, you might want to wait and buy this installment with later ones in a group (so they'll feel like a novel, when you read them together), or maybe Cross will put a few in an actual  novel after she publishes them this way first.* The next book picks up in a spot later than the camp event discussed at the end of this book. If you're reading #2 and #3 back-to-back, keep the scene jump in mind.Book #1 was:Letters to Nowhere (Letters to Nowhere Part 1)Book #3 is:Return to You (Letters to Nowhere Part 3)