author: Gayle Forman
rating: 2/10
genre: young adult romance
best for ages: 8 to 10
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I would not have started reading this book if not for my language arts class. We had to pick out a book from my teacher’s list, so I chose this one, since it had an interesting synopsis.
It might have been the worst decision I’ve made in my whole in her class.
On the first read, I sped through it to get a sense of what was happening, but didn’t give it much thought.
But after reading this book for school with more detail and annotation, I’ve concluded that if you were a 4th grader with a developing appetite for cringe romance, you would like this book. Because in my opinion, it cannot classify as YA at this level.
My reasoning is as follows:
1. Bland, generic characters that have little to no character development and just didn’t make me feel anything. In essentially the first two chapters all Foreman did was the exposition, describing the characters and giving them very straightforward character traits. No flaws, either. Just this amazing, perfect, everyday-life family. Maybe she was trying to give them some flawless personality traits so that I would feel for them later but frankly, I could not care less because of the way she wrote it.
2. The sappy main character that got on my nerves. What is her personality except for simping for her rising-to-fame boyfriend and being a tad bit sad about her entire family dying? I assume the author was trying to express that she was overwhelmed with grief but I, for one, did not see that at all.
3. Extremely predictable plot. I’m not even going to refrain from spoilers because there’s nothing to spoil. She almost dies in a car crash, everyone is scared for her when she’s in the hospital, she gets to pick whether or not she wants to continue living, and in the end she decides to live because of her boyfriend. I read this book because the synonpsis looked cool and all mysterious, but that’s the end of the good part to this book. Who writes a young adult book like that? A 3.92 rating on Goodreads is far too high for a plotline like that.
4. Just the core themes and concepts of this book. First off, she gets to choose whether or not she wants to go back to life? That seems like something that I can come up with all the time inside my head, laying in bed and thinking about random crap. It does not sound like a carefully thought out idea that she put a lot of work into. I’d hoped, once that whole revival thing was introduced, that it would only last a bit, so that we could see her actually interact with other people instead of just think about her past. But NO, the entire story is just her debating whether or not she wants to return to the living. Please, that is such a boring idea that just doesn’t make any sense at all.
5. Of course, the romance. She’s literally nothing except a hopeless, simpy romantic who relies completely on her boyfriend, cannot think of anything except for her little conflicts with him. Also, can you believe that the guy broke into a hospital to look at his girlfriend? I just wanted to ask, are you guys okay? The boyfriend, Adam, took so much of the plot away from Kim, her best friend. I actually liked Kim and wanted to hear more about her, but nope, it’s just Adam. Half the book is made up of flashbacks about nothing important. Just her and Adam being desperately in love. And it’s even smutty too, which is not necessary.
After finishing this book, I looked at the cover and then I saw something that just made me want to rip it apart.
Can you believe that someone wrote the words “live for love” on the cover of a book? Can you believe it? Who in the world does that? It was pretty much implied throughout the book that she only revived herself for her one and only Adam, but for the author or editor or whatever to have that absolute trash theme blatantly on the cover — that was my last straw that made the book drop straight from a three-star on Goodreads to one. What kind of a person do you have to be to live only for your boyfriend or girlfriend? Get a life, please.
I could go on about this book but it’s not important. Just know that maybe some people would have liked this book, but I’m not going to lie, I sped through this book in an hour, not because it was thrilling but because it was so boring. And literallly all I thought at the end was, what crap did I just read?
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