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veereading 's review for:
The Unbinding of Mary Reade
by Miriam McNamara
Oh boy... where do I start with this novel? I so wanted to love it but it just did not work at all. I think the idea was fantastic. It just failed on execution.
I found the story to be quite boring, which is weird because this is a book about PIRATES. But it really just felt like nothing was happening throughout the story; at times, it even felt like a biography than an actual fictional tale. I think this can be attributed to the fact that the characters were very one-dimensional and were hard to connect with. It was hard to distinguish the different voices of the characters because they just didn't really have much of a personality. I think Anne Bonny was developed a little bit better than Mary Reade, but even that is a bit of a stretch. I also didn't love the writing as it was far too juvenile for this type of story. It read more like a middle grade book than a YA fiction novel. It also seemed as if it was just a draft copy and not a full-fledged book. It definitely needed a lot more editing for the story to really shine through.
I don't want to go on and on bashing this novel. Clearly, the author had a really great concept and just wasn't able to follow through with it. Suffice to say that it wasn't what I had wanted or expected. For those reasons, I'm giving it a 1/5 stars.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this eARC in exchange for my honest review.
I found the story to be quite boring, which is weird because this is a book about PIRATES. But it really just felt like nothing was happening throughout the story; at times, it even felt like a biography than an actual fictional tale. I think this can be attributed to the fact that the characters were very one-dimensional and were hard to connect with. It was hard to distinguish the different voices of the characters because they just didn't really have much of a personality. I think Anne Bonny was developed a little bit better than Mary Reade, but even that is a bit of a stretch. I also didn't love the writing as it was far too juvenile for this type of story. It read more like a middle grade book than a YA fiction novel. It also seemed as if it was just a draft copy and not a full-fledged book. It definitely needed a lot more editing for the story to really shine through.
I don't want to go on and on bashing this novel. Clearly, the author had a really great concept and just wasn't able to follow through with it. Suffice to say that it wasn't what I had wanted or expected. For those reasons, I'm giving it a 1/5 stars.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this eARC in exchange for my honest review.