Alex Barclay

Trigger warnings: Death of a mother, grief and loss depiction

6/10, this was a fine but unremarkable young adult novel but at least the premise was interesting and the execution wasn't horrible rather it was just ok and if the author tried harder it would've been even better of a book. Already I could see that the main character Ellery Brown is different from other main characters because her mother died for an unexplained reason and her father is still a mystery and finding him is the central aspect of the book however it didn't need to be nearly 500 pages long when part of it is just filler and should've been removed from the editing process. Ellery at the beginning grieved over her mother dying and then she begins the search for her father and she surprisingly narrowed it down to three suspects named Quentin, Jean-Luc and two other ones whose names I forgot and three of them were just authors and the last one had zero characteristics which I disliked considering that it's the main part of the book. After a few hundred snail paced sluggish pages later I finally got to see who Ellery's father was and he was called Dan the carpenter and she inferred that only because he was strong and thus she was and that was unrealistic yet heartwarming and I didn't mind that as long as the ending was happy and this all felt inspired by the Dork Diaries series by Rachel Renee Russell but I think it's only a coincidence. If you like heartwarming stories about searching for something read this but it's only passable and there are better realistic novels you can read like Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley.… (more)

Well this is the longest it has ever taken me to finish a book.

There were so many positive aspects to this novel but the pacing was off for me and it was quite a hectic plot. New characters kept popping up and disappearing with random creature attacks throughout the book to add a bit of action, and lots of old men telling stories where we find out about other things that are going on elsewhere or in the past, and then suddenly we are back in another crazy fight for survival. Phew! The result was a story that felt disjointed with too much going on for readers to really settle in the story. I kept picking it up and putting it down. I got there in the end but it won't make it to my booktalk shelves.… (more)