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3.5 AVERAGE
3.5 AVERAGE
Tamara Goodwin has just lost everything. Her life, her school and she's quickly losing her friends too. Her succesful businessdad has killed himself after making bad deals and she's moved to the countryside. Her mother is still alive, but so caught up in grieving that she's hardly there.
Tamara is a spoiled brat and has to learn some different ways. When a travelling library comes by she borrows a leather-bound volume which soon begins to change the way she lives her life. Although the book doesn't seem to answer the oddities in her aunt Rosaleen's behaviour and her mothers distance.
This book was a very pleasant surprise. The speaker has a fresh young voice, very plausible. The mystery builds tightly and the answers aren't entirely forseeable. Highly recommendable.
Tamara is a spoiled brat and has to learn some different ways. When a travelling library comes by she borrows a leather-bound volume which soon begins to change the way she lives her life. Although the book doesn't seem to answer the oddities in her aunt Rosaleen's behaviour and her mothers distance.
This book was a very pleasant surprise. The speaker has a fresh young voice, very plausible. The mystery builds tightly and the answers aren't entirely forseeable. Highly recommendable.
Well written and hard to put down. After each chapter that I finished, I was left wanting to read more, wanting to figure out what was really going on. Is this family she’s staying with crazy? Is Tamara crazy? And where did this magic come from? There are many aspects to the story that make you go ah-hah when the pieces start to fall together and I love moments like that. The little bits of information the author slips in and ties it all in at a later moment – those are the best. Ahern certainly has a way with writing and many pieces of the ending were a surprise, yet made complete sense. The book is funny, it’s sad, and overall it’s charming.
Despite the interesting premise, this book falls fairly flat. The Book of Tomorrow lacks understanding its own identity. It is coming-of-age? Is it Chick-Lit? Is it realistic fantasy? I don't know either.
I started to give this 3 stars...but I had to, upon writing this review, bump that down one because this just does not have the footing to bear its own weight.
Yes, the main character is a hard one to like. Tamara is spoiled and arrogant, but I think her main flaw is that she feels just like a clumsy attempt at creating and developing a teenaged character. Some writers can do this as adults without the seams showing, but here Ahern can't quite seem to manage her own creation and write her properly. At times, Tamara feels much younger than 17-ish, and at other times she feels several years older. The cracks in her construction feel neither organic nor purposeful, but rather simply lacking in cohesion and truth.
The mystery and realistic fantasy in this book felt very placed—to the point where I would honestly prefer it to have instead revealed that Tamara had temporarily lost her senses from grief. This apparent attempt at magic and wonder felt, by the end of the book, completely and utterly out of place. It is as though Ahern came up with this point as the idea—this titular book of tomorrow—and created a story around that, but forgot to anchor the realism to the magical element of a book that supposedly shakes our heroine to her core.
The regular human elements to this book, if they had been better developed and planned, would have made for a really decent novel. While readable and fairly intriguing (which is what kept me going), the mystery element doesn't feel bolstered up properly. It's bookended by an overly dramatic soap opera and an out-of-place magic book.
The mystery element (and all its revelations) is the saving grace in this one. Aside from that, this is just an okay kind of story and not really recommendable.
I started to give this 3 stars...but I had to, upon writing this review, bump that down one because this just does not have the footing to bear its own weight.
Yes, the main character is a hard one to like. Tamara is spoiled and arrogant, but I think her main flaw is that she feels just like a clumsy attempt at creating and developing a teenaged character. Some writers can do this as adults without the seams showing, but here Ahern can't quite seem to manage her own creation and write her properly. At times, Tamara feels much younger than 17-ish, and at other times she feels several years older. The cracks in her construction feel neither organic nor purposeful, but rather simply lacking in cohesion and truth.
The mystery and realistic fantasy in this book felt very placed—to the point where I would honestly prefer it to have instead revealed that Tamara had temporarily lost her senses from grief. This apparent attempt at magic and wonder felt, by the end of the book, completely and utterly out of place. It is as though Ahern came up with this point as the idea—this titular book of tomorrow—and created a story around that, but forgot to anchor the realism to the magical element of a book that supposedly shakes our heroine to her core.
The regular human elements to this book, if they had been better developed and planned, would have made for a really decent novel. While readable and fairly intriguing (which is what kept me going), the mystery element doesn't feel bolstered up properly. It's bookended by an overly dramatic soap opera and an out-of-place magic book.
The mystery element (and all its revelations) is the saving grace in this one. Aside from that, this is just an okay kind of story and not really recommendable.
The pacing of the book is extremely slow and almost nothing happens throughout the story except that the whiny protagonist occasionally meets random characters that eventually play a bigger role in the last 30 pages. Yes, the last 30 pages. The only pages where something happens and that something isn't even original or mind boggling.
Good read....liked the mystery. Book was a bit slow at the beginning, but picked up upon finding the diary. Liked the pace toward the middle and end. Satisfying ending.
emotional
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Tamara Goodwin has lived a privileged life until her father father commits suicide because he can't pay his debts and she and her mother move in with her aunt and uncle in the country. There she finds a book that seems to predict the future.
This book had a fun Gothic feel reminiscent on a Bronte novel. I got into the mystery and it kept me engaged. My one compliant would be that the book wrapped up too quickly in the end.
This book had a fun Gothic feel reminiscent on a Bronte novel. I got into the mystery and it kept me engaged. My one compliant would be that the book wrapped up too quickly in the end.