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laneylegz's review
5.0
This is a humorous, sometimes sad, engaging book written in a day to day form. Marigold is in a coma and is hearing everything people who come to visit her are saying. Trying to piece together the wreck that put her in the hospital while trying to "wake up". Her selfish family, her friendly roommate, a mysterious poet visitor, a kooky psychic, a homicidal nun, a stubborn doctor, and Detective Jack Terry (YES, from the bodymovers series) Sometimes hysterical because people are using Marigold as a confessional thinking she can't hear them, sometimes sad because she is struggling to wake up and communicate, and emotional as she has to decide if she wake up will she spill the secrets. Also this book has tidbits of Detective Terry's relationship with Carlotta in the Bodymovers series (I was excited)
aisforawkward's review against another edition
4.0
So this was one of those random reads I found via Kindle Unlimited and nearly skipped because it seemed so unlikely. I am so so glad I gave the first part a try. Though I am rating the "complete" paperback, I actually read this in the 6 individual kindle serials.
The basic premise is that of a girl who "wakes up" in a long term care hospital room, in a coma. She is non-responsive, can't move, doesn't feel her body or touch, but is intermittently aware and can hear and smell. She has no memory of how she got there, and in fact her memory is spotty at best, losing track of day to day details. The book is written as though she is narrating in the first person to someone, while she is still in the coma, of what is going on around her and to some extent in her head. This mostly worked, except in the few occasional bits where she inexplicably directly referenced the supposed reader. It also had issues in later chapters of the serial, where she suddenly throws in the occasional paragraph reiterating back story from a previous one, even though each serial is written as though there it is a single cohesive narrative, with an entry for every single day from the first she becomes aware. These two things, the reminders of past events, and the direct reference to the reader, undermined the overall storytelling style. Luckily these were both few and far between.
It was shelved as romance, but it really isn't, and what romance there is was frankly disappointing in a lot of ways, and not simply because she was in a Coma.
What the book was most about was the struggle she had with being aware but trapped, while her family and friends unraveled around her, and how much people (including strangers) seemed to treat her as a confessional.
It has elements of the supernatural with a hilariously bad psychic who is only mostly a fraud. Not to mention a family who doesn't know each other at all, at times even proud of the fact that no matter how dysfunctional they are they have never gotten outside help much less talked about their problems amongst themselves.
I wasn't entirely happy with the ending, first because of the way the romance played out, and second because of the ultimately abrupt nature of the end. Not that it was bad, but that too many threads felt unresolved, and overly rushed at the very end. Surprisingly it still ended mostly well, it just needed another 10 pages or so to explore a few themes in a more satisfying way.
I am not going to go in depth into anything else, because spoilers, and only two of the surprise twists did I see coming from the beginning. The rest were half the fun of reading the book, especially experiencing the sudden twists as she does.
The ending, and the flaws in narration bring this down from a 5 to a 4, but it was close for me. It wasn't perfect, and at times it was predictable, but I loved the concept and the characters.
Recommend to people who like first person narratives, especially daily serial/diary style entries, don't mind the occasional bit of supernatural in a contemporary, and who don't mind that the romance is sparse to non-existent and more or less irrational, but enjoy books that explore themes of (especially dysfunctional) relationships.
The basic premise is that of a girl who "wakes up" in a long term care hospital room, in a coma. She is non-responsive, can't move, doesn't feel her body or touch, but is intermittently aware and can hear and smell. She has no memory of how she got there, and in fact her memory is spotty at best, losing track of day to day details. The book is written as though she is narrating in the first person to someone, while she is still in the coma, of what is going on around her and to some extent in her head. This mostly worked, except in the few occasional bits where she inexplicably directly referenced the supposed reader. It also had issues in later chapters of the serial, where she suddenly throws in the occasional paragraph reiterating back story from a previous one, even though each serial is written as though there it is a single cohesive narrative, with an entry for every single day from the first she becomes aware. These two things, the reminders of past events, and the direct reference to the reader, undermined the overall storytelling style. Luckily these were both few and far between.
It was shelved as romance, but it really isn't, and what romance there is was frankly disappointing in a lot of ways, and not simply because she was in a Coma.
What the book was most about was the struggle she had with being aware but trapped, while her family and friends unraveled around her, and how much people (including strangers) seemed to treat her as a confessional.
It has elements of the supernatural with a hilariously bad psychic who is only mostly a fraud. Not to mention a family who doesn't know each other at all, at times even proud of the fact that no matter how dysfunctional they are they have never gotten outside help much less talked about their problems amongst themselves.
I wasn't entirely happy with the ending, first because of the way the romance played out, and second because of the ultimately abrupt nature of the end. Not that it was bad, but that too many threads felt unresolved, and overly rushed at the very end. Surprisingly it still ended mostly well, it just needed another 10 pages or so to explore a few themes in a more satisfying way.
I am not going to go in depth into anything else, because spoilers, and only two of the surprise twists did I see coming from the beginning. The rest were half the fun of reading the book, especially experiencing the sudden twists as she does.
The ending, and the flaws in narration bring this down from a 5 to a 4, but it was close for me. It wasn't perfect, and at times it was predictable, but I loved the concept and the characters.
Recommend to people who like first person narratives, especially daily serial/diary style entries, don't mind the occasional bit of supernatural in a contemporary, and who don't mind that the romance is sparse to non-existent and more or less irrational, but enjoy books that explore themes of (especially dysfunctional) relationships.
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