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A review by andipants
Ember Island by Kimberley Freeman
2.0
I really liked the first third or so of this book. I found Tilly's character sympathetic and, while it was hard to read about her husband's behavior toward her, it was satisfying to see how she finally stood up for herself. Nina's storyline interested me less, but I'm a sucker for people finding old papers and journals and figuring out the story behind them, so I was willing to go with it - but then everything went off the rails.
Tilly quickly went from being flawed but sympathetic to straight-up irrational and out of control - the very descriptors that put her into what the reader is clearly supposed to see as a righteous rage when others accuse her of it. It's hard to sympathize with her when they have such a strong point. All her plans and actions leading up to the climax of the book struck me as ridiculous and poorly thought out, the plot twists were facile, and the ending of her storyline came out of nowhere, completely unearned.
Nina's storyline just kind of wandered off on its own, losing any real connection with Tilly's. Nina gained no particular insight from reading Nell's journals, and she never found out what happened to Tilly, or even confirmed for sure who she was. Even the big reveal came off as pretty hollow; no one else seemed to care at all, so the idea that she'd been torturing herself with the guilt over the issue just seemed a little silly.
I also never found Nell as a character compelling in the slightest. As a child, she was presented as attention-starved and extraordinarily precocious, but instead of a precocious child, she came across as a mini-adult. She conveniently knew everything that was going on all the time (thanks to her ridiculously overstated fondness for eavesdropping) and had a beyond-precociously-mature perspective on anything and everything. We also never got to see what happened to her after age 13, which is disappointing, because Nina hinted at her having become a really awesome, fascinating person and having a really engaging perspective in her adult papers, but we the readers never got to see any of that.
The writing was uneven and sloppy in some places, particularly with regards to maintaining believability in some of the first-person sections. The voice in the diary passages was especially problematic; there was no real differentiation between Nell's supposedly child voice and the general narration, and very little attention paid in some places to how first-person narration works. This led to some extremely awkward bits, such as this gem on page 34, where Nell notes, "He nodded, then remembered he couldn't see me in the dark." Really?
I wanted to like this book, but overall it ended up a disappointment, made all the more so for the promising start. I'd give this one a pass.
Tilly quickly went from being flawed but sympathetic to straight-up irrational and out of control - the very descriptors that put her into what the reader is clearly supposed to see as a righteous rage when others accuse her of it. It's hard to sympathize with her when they have such a strong point. All her plans and actions leading up to the climax of the book struck me as ridiculous and poorly thought out, the plot twists were facile, and the ending of her storyline came out of nowhere, completely unearned.
Nina's storyline just kind of wandered off on its own, losing any real connection with Tilly's. Nina gained no particular insight from reading Nell's journals, and she never found out what happened to Tilly, or even confirmed for sure who she was. Even the big reveal
Spoiler
of her having kind-of-but-not-really plagiarized her booksI also never found Nell as a character compelling in the slightest. As a child, she was presented as attention-starved and extraordinarily precocious, but instead of a precocious child, she came across as a mini-adult. She conveniently knew everything that was going on all the time (thanks to her ridiculously overstated fondness for eavesdropping) and had a beyond-precociously-mature perspective on anything and everything. We also never got to see what happened to her after age 13, which is disappointing, because Nina hinted at her having become a really awesome, fascinating person and having a really engaging perspective in her adult papers, but we the readers never got to see any of that.
The writing was uneven and sloppy in some places, particularly with regards to maintaining believability in some of the first-person sections. The voice in the diary passages was especially problematic; there was no real differentiation between Nell's supposedly child voice and the general narration, and very little attention paid in some places to how first-person narration works. This led to some extremely awkward bits, such as this gem on page 34, where Nell notes, "He nodded, then remembered he couldn't see me in the dark." Really?
I wanted to like this book, but overall it ended up a disappointment, made all the more so for the promising start. I'd give this one a pass.