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A review by lindsayw
The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook
3.0
I am ridiculously excited to announce that this is the first giveaway I have ever won! I am really looking forward to reviewing it when it arrives :)
Update: Now that I'm done the book, here is my attempt to review it, even though I'm not totally sure what I thought of it yet. I'd probably put my rating at 3.5 stars, because I want to give it a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. There were some stylistic/diction related things about this book that I didn't really like, such as overly wordy descriptions, or using the same word several times in a paragraph that I thought could have been better if they'd been edited more. And, given that I was reading an "unedited proof" version, I daresay the final version is probably better than what I read, so I don't want to be too harsh in that respect.
In spite of my small issues in that respect, this book was pretty good. The characters of Rachael and Stefan in particular were well-written, I thought, because they go through more transformation and actually grow over the course of the book. I felt that Lewis and Freda didn't really get this same opportunity, maybe because the book is only 320 pages, so there isn't a whole lot of time to get the whole story out for everyone. While I found that Rachael went from being quite bitter and overly stand-offish to actually being fairly sympathetic despite her flaws, Freda just seemed nasty. Maybe justifiably so, given the hardships she's suffered, but she was hard to like, and I didn't really see much growth in her character.
The story was compelling, and the premise is interesting, but I would have liked to see a bit more interaction between the families as a whole, which I guess is what I was expecting based on the summary on the back of the book. By isolating them to little moments between two characters at a time, I never felt that they were learning about one another, but really just co-existing.
In the end, this was a book with a lot of potential, and it lives up to it to a certain extent, and it's possible the final version is even better. There was a little something missing for me, though.
Update: Now that I'm done the book, here is my attempt to review it, even though I'm not totally sure what I thought of it yet. I'd probably put my rating at 3.5 stars, because I want to give it a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. There were some stylistic/diction related things about this book that I didn't really like, such as overly wordy descriptions, or using the same word several times in a paragraph that I thought could have been better if they'd been edited more. And, given that I was reading an "unedited proof" version, I daresay the final version is probably better than what I read, so I don't want to be too harsh in that respect.
In spite of my small issues in that respect, this book was pretty good. The characters of Rachael and Stefan in particular were well-written, I thought, because they go through more transformation and actually grow over the course of the book. I felt that Lewis and Freda didn't really get this same opportunity, maybe because the book is only 320 pages, so there isn't a whole lot of time to get the whole story out for everyone. While I found that Rachael went from being quite bitter and overly stand-offish to actually being fairly sympathetic despite her flaws, Freda just seemed nasty. Maybe justifiably so, given the hardships she's suffered, but she was hard to like, and I didn't really see much growth in her character.
The story was compelling, and the premise is interesting, but I would have liked to see a bit more interaction between the families as a whole, which I guess is what I was expecting based on the summary on the back of the book. By isolating them to little moments between two characters at a time, I never felt that they were learning about one another, but really just co-existing.
In the end, this was a book with a lot of potential, and it lives up to it to a certain extent, and it's possible the final version is even better. There was a little something missing for me, though.