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larryerick 's review for:
Leaving Blythe River
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Spoiler Alert! The cover picture for this book is a lie. The main character in this book does not cross a river so shallow his horse's hooves barely get wet. He does not ride alone. He does not even ride a horse. It is a stimulating picture though, isn't it? The book is very much the same. The various characters do not act like normal people. And the writing style is stimulating. The author strings together snippets of moments and interactions, out-of-context with other moments and with real life, and asks the reader to believe them on their face. It all flows together...unless you are more concerned with how life actually is. Sorry, I can't list all the ways she does this without actually spoiling the book for other readers. At some point in reading this, I imagined the author as some person stuck inside their home, restricted to looking out at passers-by, unable to hear them talking. Or watching TV with all foreign-language dialogue, unable to understand a word they were saying. And yet, every so often the author's TV would hiccup and show a few minutes of Academy Award-winning movies in her native language, leaving her with some "truth" but being forced to make up all the rest of the world around her from her own conjecture. In reading about the author, I found she is well-traveled. So that means she doesn't pay that much attention to the details of what she has been seeing, or she just doesn't care to tell the truth about the human condition to sell her books. My wife said she thought this book was aimed at much younger readers. If she meant it's aimed at teenagers who think you can get pregnant by kissing, then she may be right.