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A review by knkayaktel
The Last Letter From Sicily by Lindsay Marie Morris
3.0
A young Italian girl and her lover are separated by sea and war when Concetta goes to the USA with her family and Gaetano fights for Italy. While the plot was good, the writing style was not great. I love historical fiction romances (which this is slightly), especially revolving around WWII. The struggle of a foreigner in the USA learning the culture while being unable to talk to her boyfriend due to war politics was new to me which was fun. However, the writing felt very middle grade. Shorter sentences, very basic dialogue, simplistic plot and actions.
Short entries of what was happening between large gaps in time (in addition to the simplistic writing) made it hard to get into while being a quick read. It was difficult to connect to the characters as there wasn't much depth to them. It was very surface level. Much of the story felt like it was more of a retelling of a backstory than the actual plot.
And then when the younger sister's "pov" appeared, the writing turned even more juvenielle making it seem like she was 6 rather than in 6th grade.
I felt like there was a lot of fluff "entries" that did not add to the story but were just there for the page count. and then there were unresolved topicslike the innaporpriate boss .
One random thing that bothered me was how short the letters were, or at least how short the reader got to see them. They were writing about once a month because everything took so long, but the letters were only a couple sentences to a paragraph most of the time. You'd think they would make the most out of what they could.
The issues and reconnections and forgiveness and everything felt rushed and not in depth, making it hard to care or feel like it was really happening. Resolutions felt too easy.
I think the story had a lot of potential and I am disappointed I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.
Short entries of what was happening between large gaps in time (in addition to the simplistic writing) made it hard to get into while being a quick read. It was difficult to connect to the characters as there wasn't much depth to them. It was very surface level. Much of the story felt like it was more of a retelling of a backstory than the actual plot.
And then when the younger sister's "pov" appeared, the writing turned even more juvenielle making it seem like she was 6 rather than in 6th grade.
I felt like there was a lot of fluff "entries" that did not add to the story but were just there for the page count. and then there were unresolved topics
One random thing that bothered me was how short the letters were, or at least how short the reader got to see them. They were writing about once a month because everything took so long, but the letters were only a couple sentences to a paragraph most of the time. You'd think they would make the most out of what they could.
The issues and reconnections and forgiveness and everything felt rushed and not in depth, making it hard to care or feel like it was really happening. Resolutions felt too easy.
I think the story had a lot of potential and I am disappointed I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.