Amber
Written on Mar 30, 2012
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I really liked the sound of The Summer My Life Began when I looked up the premise on GoodReads. I'm really into contemporary novels right now, and I love summer books so I was really looking forward to reading it and I was so, so happy when I saw it was available on NetGalley. Unfortunately, the poor writing style and the wooden characters meant that the book didn't live up to my expectations.
My main issue with this book is the writing style. There is a lot of telling instead of showing and lots of "I did this, and then twenty minutes later I did that." I couldn't get into the book and I found myself becoming very bored very quickly.
The characters weren't appealing either. Elizabeth Margaret (or Em) didn't have much of a personality. I knew she liked cooking, but that's about it. The secondary characters are all pretty plain, especially the love interest who is meant to be a broken, tortured soul. There's also a contrived love triangle in the beginning, and this annoyed me. Why does every book nowadays have a love triangle?
The author does throw a twist in, and it could have been good if I hadn't been able to tell what it was from the first chapter. It wasn't surprising for me, and so it didn't draw me in like it could have.
I can't recommend this book to people, because it was just so boring. I have read a lot of mixed things about it, so definitely check out some other reviews before deciding. You might like it! I just couldn't get past the wooden writing, dialogue and characters.