I'm not sure if I can give this book a full rating, seeing as I only got about 50% through before deciding I wouldn't waste another second of my life on this story.
(From 53% through)
Maybe liked PG-13
Language: PG-13 (Uses of d*mn, sh*t, h*ll)
Sex: PG (One character asks another "Did you get any?" in reference to a date)
Violence: PG (I don't know. I guess things happened at the asylum)
Drugs/Alcohol: G
I found this book at Goodwill and picked it up because, hey, I heard people liked it. Now I know that it was at Goodwill for a very good reason. This is a story about 16 year old Dan Crawford who gets to go to this program for smart kids as they take college classes for 5 weeks. The hitch though is that the kids are housed in an old mental asylum that the college is converting into a dorm. Shenanigans ensue.
Usually, I'm very good at reading books until the very end, even if they're terribly hard to get in to. I rarely ever DON'T finish books. I didn't get into Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children until about 120 pages in, but I persevered because I happened to like the characters and I knew it was going somewhere. I could tell from the very first page. However with this book, I disliked it from the very beginning. The book felt like it just wasn't going anywhere. I can't exactly put my finger on why I felt this way, but I just know that I didn't remotely care about where the characters were going and what was going to happen to them.
I came into this book expecting to read something with a real YA flair. I expected the writing to be more engaging and thoughtful, but instead I got a book that sounded like it was written by twelve-year-olds. These characters are supposed to be the smartest kids in their school year as they prepare to go off to college. Instead, they sounded juvenile. I just wanted to shake them. The writing style came off as boring. It didn't take a lot of thinking. I found my eyes glazing over before I would lose my place. (Then I would just think, oh well. There's literally nothing I'll miss, before going on to the next page).
From the very start there was not one single character I cared about. Dan was literally the most boring character I've ever read in my life. His friends Abby and what's-his-face weren't much better. (What's-his-face is Jordan. I just looked it up). They're so bad that I forget their names. I feel like there was something that made Dan different from everyone else, but I can't remember for the life of me what that something was. If you don't constantly remind the reader what it is that makes your character tick, they're going to forget it and move on and the character's just going to become Joe Average without any sense of humor or any drive. What makes a good book is having a character that has a goal in mind to achieve. Dan had nothing.
The plot wasn't good either. It dragged. And it dragged. And it dragged. The author tried to weave mysteries into the chapters and tried to end them on cliffhangers, but honestly...I didn't care. It wasn't engaging enough. It didn't feel real to me. It didn't feel like something that could be going on with real people in real places. There was this whole scene with the Three Musketeers sneaking into a locked office and finding all these old pictures. They were supposed to be creepy. They weren't. Then there was this whole thing with the serial killer which I guess we were supposed to care about. I didn't. And just to add to the mystery, Abby's aunt may or may not have been a resident there. Ooooo. Still don't care.
Not to mention that the old pictures through out the book had absolutely nothing to do with anything happening in the chapters.
I honestly don't have much more to rant about. I only read through it halfway and I already forget half of what happened, so we'll just end this review here.
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adjö,
lauren
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