inlibrisveritas
Written on Sep 6, 2010
Editing aside, the story itself needs some work. It has potential to be a good novel and the story overall is fairly interesting, but somethings just didn't feel right. The characters themselves are interesting and have some depth to them, but I feel the speech is a little forced at times and switches between informal and formal with an uncomfortable frequency. The first thought I had about the writing style was along the lines of "fan-fic" status; it came off as a interesting story but written with a lack of details in speech, character development, etc. A lot of the story line did come off as "that would never happen" but as it is fiction it's always hard for me to decide when it's okay for that to take place. I did enjoy the scenery created for the village as well as them living an older and 'outdated' lifestyle because it sounds truly beautiful not to mention relaxing. As I mentioned before, the speech was very hard to relate to and even embarrassing to read it at times. I'm not shy about book content but when a character is overly naive I become embarrassed for them and it makes me want to put the book down. I also have trouble classifying this into a genre really, it would seem young-adult from just looking at the summary and the title but as the story progressed it kind of grew out of that in some areas but remained young-adult in all the rest.
Overall if this were reworked some I think this could rise to it's full potential, but as it is now it's simply okay. There is some violence but nothing too terrible so there shouldn't be any real concern there. There is however a lot of 'private' talk. By this I mean the embarrassing niavity I mentioned earlier, that hovers around sex. There is also a few sex scenes that are fairly tasteful. I can't say I fully recommend this but if you do ever want to try it I suggest trying to find a copy to borrow.