My coworker let me borrow her ARC so that we could discuss it
A VERY strong 4 stars
Darcy wrote a story; a paranormal romance that starts with a terrorist attack and continues with a non-dead girl who can totally talk to ghosts. A publisher paid her big money for her story. Now, right after graduating high school, she is off to New York to start a career, and her life, while putting college on hold. One chapter of this novel is Darcy's life story, and the next is her written novel. Essentially this is two complete novels in one.
What do you do when an author you like writes a book that doesn't sound like it could possibly be written well? You have someone else read it first of course! Now, I really didn't have a say in that. My coworker was going to read it first anyway. If she told me it was a flop, I would have skipped it. She ended up loving it and passing it along to me.
If I had read it without talking to my coworker first and had low expectations, I probably would have given it 5 stars. Just reading the premise, I wasn't sure how he was possibly going to be able to essentially write 2 stories in one novel. I often hate dueling chapters, getting them confused or forgetting parts from chapter to chapter. If that somehow doesn't happen, I always end up loving one part and hating the rest. Since I was assured that it worked well, I think my expectations were raised a bit.
Westerfeld accomplished something I didn't think possible. He wrote two completely different stories and managed to tie them together in a way that really worked. I liked both stories. I didn't have a hard time keeping details separated, but each story definitely had enough detail to paint pictures in my head.
Now, why did I only give it 4 stars? It is over 600 pages. Somewhere in the middle, I put the book down and forgot about it for a couple days. No, it wasn't a huge break, but the fact that I wasn't pining to read more means it wasn't an A+. At one point, I was a bit over Darcy. I still liked her life story and wanted to know what happened, but I was ready for it to just happen already. Her novel never quite got that way, but it wasn't quite perfect enough to raise the whole novel up.
I'm glad I read this one. I think a lot of teens will like the story of Darcy and how she grows into her adult self. Her novel will draw you in from the first chapter, no doubt about that. A warning to parents, there are girlfriend/girlfriend relationships, some major curse words, and underage drinking without any kind of consequence whatsoever. None of these bothered me or would even bother me as a parent, but it is something that definitely needs mentioning.
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