Review: Expected so Much More
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 10, 2014
The tale being told here is all about Dawn, a young girl growing up in the turbulent era of the late sixties. Drugs and alcohol are the norm, running free the desire of pretty much everybody. Dawn lives in small town America, where everybody knows every one, and all of your business is headline news. School and work are the requisite activities and hanging out smoking pot and drinking some pilfered beers are what the teens do. Yet Dawn seeks something more, and steps out on a journey to grow.Many readers are calling this a "coming of age" story and to some it may seem that way, but for me, it went nowhere, literally. Dawn is looking for something, but while she is looking the world is slipping right by, and while you could argue that the era was like that, I know enough from listening to my parents, aunts, uncles, and family friends as I grew up in the seventies to know there was a lot going on around the world. The story fell flat, like a day old beer left in the sun. The characters, Dawn and her various men, should have had more "character" and I expected more. The plot was definitely there, but managed to frequently get lost, in the various changes of the men in Dawn's life.I liked the essence of what Bloodworth was trying to approach, I just felt underwhelmed by she presented it. Having often wanted to tackle this very era in my own writing, being from the Great Lakes region myself, I saw so much more potential that fell to the wayside. More character development is necessary and a solid flow of story plot would make this book so much easier to enjoy. Just my humble opinion.