Review: After the Sky fell...it kept falling
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 19, 2013
This may contain spoilers....dunno. Depends on what you call a spoiler.At 400 pages this was a really long book and it felt even longer. I felt like I was treading in peanut butter because I never felt like I went anywhere.It's not that long books bother me, but this is a really heavy read. I kept waiting for something to happen but really all it was was Kathryn comparing her dead fiancé to every man she met. I get the grieving process, I do. I've lived it and the first year is hell because there are all these firsts: first Christmas, first birthday, first everything without your loved one. But this was too much. It made for a hard read because there were so few light moments to break through the darkness. I felt like the author just kept throwing Ben in our face, and Kathryn's, to make this book longer, and to make Kathryn suffer. I wish this had been half the length, I truly do because a lot of this was redundant. I got it...she missed Ben. I got it...she couldn't live without him. I got it because it was thrown at me for 400 pages. And yet for all her grieving, I felt disconnected from her heart ache. Like I was being told it, not shown.There were some grammar problems, a lot of head hopping at weird moments that might have been prevented if this had been in first person, there was something weird going on with quotes not being in the right place and it got to be distracting as did the apostrophe with Bradley's. 95% of those apostrophes were wrong ie Dinner with the Bradley's. It began to drive me nuts. There was also an abuse of the word sarcastically. They shouted, smiled, smirked, talked, argued all sarcastically. Ack! An editor would fix those issues in a heart beat.There's a lot of potential in this book and I think that's why I kept hiking through this book, because I did want to see her healing process but it was fast and sudden and I felt let down. After all, I saw 400 pages of her pain...there needed to be more focus on her healing, on her discovering her life will go on. I really wished I had seen more of her "light" moments instead of all that dark, I needed more balance, I guess, for a lack of better word. I loved the concept of the story though and that's what keeping this from being a 1 star. As someone who went through a dark year, I know how hard it is and how precious those light moments of healing are, hence wishing I had witnessed more of them.