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A review by haia_929
The Sound of Us by Julie Hammerle
3.0
This is a trimmed down version of my review, to view the full review visit The Book Ramble.
I received a copy of this book from Entangled Publishing on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Kiki is spending her summer at opera camp this year, with the hopes that she'll prove to her parents, and her ex-bestie that she has what it takes to win a scholarship and study music full time in the future. When she gets to camp though its not exactly what she was expecting, the biggest problem being that she's not really sure opera is her "thing". Kiki's also very shy, so with the help of some new friends Kiki will need to bust out of her shell and prove to the world that she has what it takes to be a musician.
The Sound of Us was a cute read, with a lot of things going for it - like an interesting lead who is both a geek girl and on the plus size side. I liked that. I didn't like some other things about it though, the romance mainly, but also the writing wasn't my favourite, and the story pacing was all over the place. This is a sort of middling, cute-ish teen novel, not a standout but maybe a good read for people who liked that Hilary Duff movie Raise Your Voice.
Kiki is a really interesting character, as a lead she's got a ton of potential. She's a geek in a few ways - she loves studying Latin and music and she's full of pop culture knowledge - especially about her favourite TV shows. She's also ranging a little on the plus size side of things bodywise, which I thought was good - especially because it's a positive thing. Kiki learns across the book to love herself for all of her assets, including her fuller figure. Kiki as a character was the strong point of this book for the most part.
Other characters in the book are alright, they aren't really well rounded in the same way that Kiki is, and I never felt that I really knew them. I didn't feel the connection between Kiki and a lot of them either. Maybe Kendra and Norman would be the couple standouts but even then they weren't that strongly written either. There's a fairly large ensemble in this book, many of them are just bodies with one of two defining traits though so we don't really know them. A fairly major character in the book is Jack, Kiki's love interest. He has some layers, which I think are developed fairly well for the most part but not fully developed to the point that his cheating and lying later in the book really make a ton of sense to me. I also didn't really feel the connection between Kiki and Jack that would excuse his awful personality and behavior.
There was no sense of time passing in this book. The whole things meant to take place across 6 weeks, to me it felt like barely a week. There's no feeling of the long hours Kiki spends laboring away at this camp, and the bonds built between characters feel very unstable and underdeveloped as a result of this lacking depth of time.
All in all The Sound of Us is a good book, I'd recommend it more on the strength of Kiki as a character and as an important break from traditional characters in similar books, but I would never recommend it for the romance it seems so focused on selling.
I received a copy of this book from Entangled Publishing on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Kiki is spending her summer at opera camp this year, with the hopes that she'll prove to her parents, and her ex-bestie that she has what it takes to win a scholarship and study music full time in the future. When she gets to camp though its not exactly what she was expecting, the biggest problem being that she's not really sure opera is her "thing". Kiki's also very shy, so with the help of some new friends Kiki will need to bust out of her shell and prove to the world that she has what it takes to be a musician.
The Sound of Us was a cute read, with a lot of things going for it - like an interesting lead who is both a geek girl and on the plus size side. I liked that. I didn't like some other things about it though, the romance mainly, but also the writing wasn't my favourite, and the story pacing was all over the place. This is a sort of middling, cute-ish teen novel, not a standout but maybe a good read for people who liked that Hilary Duff movie Raise Your Voice.
Kiki is a really interesting character, as a lead she's got a ton of potential. She's a geek in a few ways - she loves studying Latin and music and she's full of pop culture knowledge - especially about her favourite TV shows. She's also ranging a little on the plus size side of things bodywise, which I thought was good - especially because it's a positive thing. Kiki learns across the book to love herself for all of her assets, including her fuller figure. Kiki as a character was the strong point of this book for the most part.
Other characters in the book are alright, they aren't really well rounded in the same way that Kiki is, and I never felt that I really knew them. I didn't feel the connection between Kiki and a lot of them either. Maybe Kendra and Norman would be the couple standouts but even then they weren't that strongly written either. There's a fairly large ensemble in this book, many of them are just bodies with one of two defining traits though so we don't really know them. A fairly major character in the book is Jack, Kiki's love interest. He has some layers, which I think are developed fairly well for the most part but not fully developed to the point that his cheating and lying later in the book really make a ton of sense to me. I also didn't really feel the connection between Kiki and Jack that would excuse his awful personality and behavior.
There was no sense of time passing in this book. The whole things meant to take place across 6 weeks, to me it felt like barely a week. There's no feeling of the long hours Kiki spends laboring away at this camp, and the bonds built between characters feel very unstable and underdeveloped as a result of this lacking depth of time.
All in all The Sound of Us is a good book, I'd recommend it more on the strength of Kiki as a character and as an important break from traditional characters in similar books, but I would never recommend it for the romance it seems so focused on selling.