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Melody mini review
Jan. 8th, 2016 05:21 pmThis is quick because life did that thing where it actually sucked me in and wanted attention and now I'm tired and want to sleep. I read the new BeForever Melody book because it showed up for Kindle FINALLY.
I intended to only read a couple of chapters but wound up reading the whole thing. It's a very good book and I preferred it to Maryellen's book(s), though it doesn't break up to the old six book format the way Maryellen's did, which is to say there's no Christmas story and most of the book takes place over end of spring-early fall of 1963.
My only real problems with the book were:
Melody is one of those characters who is good at EVERYTHING. For someone who wasn't good or the best at a lot of things (even the stuff I was good at, I wasn't the best), I enjoy the books where the character isn't magically better than everyone else just because they're the star of the book. Melody's got a great voice, though you could argue she doesn't have the best in the book. She's amazing with plants (impresses old ladies!), she's kind and artsy and really, I'm not sure she's given a single thing she's incapable of doing. But she's not obnoxious about it so there's that.
and
I'm still not sure how I feel about AG using a very specific real life event as a major plot point in their book. It's hard to describe how different it is from using the various wars as backdrops for stories, but it is different. It's handled very well, though, so I'm not sure my aversion to this isn't more rooted in disliking the way the fandom pretty much salivated over this being an option. THAT made me kind of ill just thinking about it. Couple this with the way people are behaving now, and the whole church shooting here last year, and it's a strange mix.
I intended to only read a couple of chapters but wound up reading the whole thing. It's a very good book and I preferred it to Maryellen's book(s), though it doesn't break up to the old six book format the way Maryellen's did, which is to say there's no Christmas story and most of the book takes place over end of spring-early fall of 1963.
My only real problems with the book were:
Melody is one of those characters who is good at EVERYTHING. For someone who wasn't good or the best at a lot of things (even the stuff I was good at, I wasn't the best), I enjoy the books where the character isn't magically better than everyone else just because they're the star of the book. Melody's got a great voice, though you could argue she doesn't have the best in the book. She's amazing with plants (impresses old ladies!), she's kind and artsy and really, I'm not sure she's given a single thing she's incapable of doing. But she's not obnoxious about it so there's that.
and
I'm still not sure how I feel about AG using a very specific real life event as a major plot point in their book. It's hard to describe how different it is from using the various wars as backdrops for stories, but it is different. It's handled very well, though, so I'm not sure my aversion to this isn't more rooted in disliking the way the fandom pretty much salivated over this being an option. THAT made me kind of ill just thinking about it. Couple this with the way people are behaving now, and the whole church shooting here last year, and it's a strange mix.