Review: Strange in Places
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 13, 2013
This was a very strange book, especially at first. I felt dropped into a puzzling situation where I didn't know anyone and had a hard time figuring out what was going on. The story read as if I should already know the characters, but they were tangled into a strange scene before I knew who anyone was. Juliette Prescott turned out to be the main character and protagonist, but the book opened from Paul Quinn's point of view. The situation and the characters weren't the only mystifying part. The sentence structure was often hard to follow or vague. Even after I had everything straightened out and settled into reading, I'd often have to read a sentence two or three times to make sense of it. Sometimes, I'd discover missing punctuation to be the culprit. Toward the end of the book, there were often extra words thrown in, as if the sentence had been revised but some of the old words left in.All in all, the story had promise. Juliette is likeable as she tries to finish her doctoral thesis, embrace a new found faith, make new friends, and decide on her future. I think the story would have been stronger if the reader had been allowed to get to know Juliette a little before the miracle happened. It was too much coming before we got into the story. The romance is also quite weak, although I do appreciate it's clean, Christian nature. Paul should have been given more space. The ending, although happy, was rather insipid, too. It was as if the story just lost steam and fizzled out.I was torn whether to rate it a 3 or a 4. In the end, I gave it a 3.5, which rounded up to a four.