Review
There are moments in a reader’s life when they just browse through whichever bookstore and stumble upon a book that tickles their interest. This is one of those moments for me. I am a sucker for short stories because of how quick they are to read, and as much as it sounds like cheating they are a way to whittle down your yearly reading goal.
Like always, I took the liberty of getting this book despite the lack of knowledge of what the story is about. The only deciding factor was the cover and despite looking like a middle grade book, we cannot deny that it is beautifully done.
I went into reading this knowing from the cover alone that this will be a romance story. It was either that or it will be a sort of story about friendship, but the former is the stronger gut instinct. And, of course, I was right. Disgustingly so.
The story follows an unusually complicated named character, Hialeah, as she gets transferred into a new school. Being the new student, she didn’t know anybody at all, but her natural curiosity and over the top nosiness, she eventually became friends with a few nice kids. And, let’s not exclude the guy (her eventual love interest) that she chose to bother a lot because he is “alone” and probably has some secret reason why.
As expected, the entire book was juvenile. Although, what I didn’t expect was how annoying the characters will be. The writing was accessible and the pacing was easy to get to, but this same reasons became the book’s downfall as well. The entire story became rushed and problems rouse simply because a conflict was needed. Parts of the story was easily neglected because of this and you come to realise that this seems more like a writing practice than anything else.
To sum, I think that the accessibility of the writing and the good pacing made this book interesting and distracted the reading experience from the actually bad characters and sequences. I believe that the story could work better if it was given more pages simply because most of the events that happened was so abrupt and no concrete reason was given for most, if not all, of the situations.
