I wanted to love this book. The cover is absolutely gorgeous and it grabs your attention right away. However, there is far too much German in it for me to even begin to understand what the word means and that takes away from it for me. Then, the characters are so plentiful that it's truly hard to keep them all organized and remembered. I found myself going back numerous times just to try and find out who a person was. There were also times when I thought I had a character figured out (Thea for instance), only to discover that she wasn't who I thought she was (the sister of Carel).
Because of numerous characters and constantly having to shift back and forth between who they were, I didn't feel a single connection to any of them. For me, that was the biggest issue. By page 60, I truly wanted to give up. I didn't understand what was going on and didn't care enough about anyone to be interested in continuing.
Characters are my favorite part of any book but all of them fell flat here. Their conversations made little sense to me and felt like a filler more than anything. Their attitudes seemed to shift so much, for instance Mari and Dean walking arm and arm and seeming to have a good time and then suddenly she's acting all weird and not making any sense in the truck drive home. None of it seemed to flow and each conversation between any of the characters left me with more questions than they ever answered.
Although this has nothing to do with the author, I also felt like the pages were pretty thick compared to other books. This book, itself, is already pretty thin but then add in pages that feel twice as thick as they should be and the book really isn't much. This ties into my thought that the majority of the conversations were fillers and were there to make a page count happen, instead of needing to be there.
I feel bad leaving two stars because it's obvious that the author put a lot of work into this but it just wasn't for me. However, someone from that area or someone who knows German may find it more interesting than I did.
Because of numerous characters and constantly having to shift back and forth between who they were, I didn't feel a single connection to any of them. For me, that was the biggest issue. By page 60, I truly wanted to give up. I didn't understand what was going on and didn't care enough about anyone to be interested in continuing.
Characters are my favorite part of any book but all of them fell flat here. Their conversations made little sense to me and felt like a filler more than anything. Their attitudes seemed to shift so much, for instance Mari and Dean walking arm and arm and seeming to have a good time and then suddenly she's acting all weird and not making any sense in the truck drive home. None of it seemed to flow and each conversation between any of the characters left me with more questions than they ever answered.
Although this has nothing to do with the author, I also felt like the pages were pretty thick compared to other books. This book, itself, is already pretty thin but then add in pages that feel twice as thick as they should be and the book really isn't much. This ties into my thought that the majority of the conversations were fillers and were there to make a page count happen, instead of needing to be there.
I feel bad leaving two stars because it's obvious that the author put a lot of work into this but it just wasn't for me. However, someone from that area or someone who knows German may find it more interesting than I did.