Elena

Might be the worst book I've read in a while. I honestly hated a few other books I read but this one I think takes the cake. What a huge waste of time. I had to keep putting it down and picking it back up and putting it down again. The characters have no depth to them, the whole thing was completely predictable. I hated the main character. She was just so messed up, I get that people don't have to have their life together but her thought process read like she was 13 years old and had not life experience what-so-ever. I could see this being targeted at maybe that tween audience but for an adult, it just made me hate myself for wasting time on it.

The story itself was just so boring and drawn out, there wasn't really anything really interesting about it at all. This was supposed to be a book about how no one's life is perfect and the struggles of this girl living in London, but then, magically, everything works out! What a miracle! Well life does NOT work that way.

Please if you haven't read it yet, don't waste your time!

This book made me angry. I do think that it was well written, and as I come from a family that was pretty poor when I was younger (not as bad as them of course) I did not feel like it was made up. I could very easily believe that everything that happened would happen with an alcoholic parent and another who clearly had some kind of mental illness.

It made me angrier and angrier as I read all of the things that kept happening. How the parents kept destroying every chance and opportunity they had. The ending made me downright furious.

I have to say that I sat down and actually read the book when I heard that the movie was coming out soon. I also found the ending to be believable (the fact that she forgave her parents) due to the fact that they basically ruined relationships for this girl. She clearly did not get what it was like to be loved and settled down with the first man who took care of her and gave her a comfortable life, later getting divorced.

As much as I really wanted to find out what happens at the end, I still felt like I didn't care much about the other children. I kept forgetting about the youngest girl altogether.

The part about Ox the piggy bank was very predictable and I was just counting down the pages until the dad stole the money to buy himself some booze. I felt that part might have been dragged out a little bit as we all (I think) knew what was coming.

I have to start off this review by saying that I am really not a fan of dystopian books, shows or movies so I may be a little biased.

When Wade found the first Easter Egg I was so excited. I thought “heck yes, the action is about to begin!”. Well, I was pretty disappointed to find out that the rest of the book was just going to be slow and him basically worshiping this girl who he has never met and being self-deprecating.

Another point that bothered me was that he went from being a guy who lived in the dumps to getting the most expensive hotel room and putting in these magic walls that are essentially impenetrable. I get that we are supposed to see him as scrappy due to the fact that he was still able to get to the OASIS even though he was some super poor kid but the jump just seemed very unrealistic.

Overall the story was fine, but very predictable.

There was only about one thing I like about this book and that was the way they described the surroundings. The locations seemed beautiful and were described so well I could almost feel like I was there.

However, the rest of the book I absolutely hated. I don't know where to start. Isabelle was a horrible person. I couldn't sympathize with her. I don't think it's because I had never had a child or miscarriages but because she was clearly mentally ill. At first, I was like okay, they decided to just keep the child for a day to take care of her, okay no problem. Then I knew that she would manipulate him into keeping her. This made me sad because it was such a cop out. Emotional manipulative woman convinces her doormat of a husband to keep someone else's child even though he KNOWS that's the wrong thing to do.

When Tom started writing the notes to Hannah I actually thought that maybe it was Isabelle and that the reader was throwing us off. I thought, wow that's going to be a twist! NOPE. Just Tom and his guilty conscience, because I should have realized that when it comes to children, women would do anything to keep them safe blah blah blah. That was the reasoning that Isabelle gave. She stated that she did not want the child to go to an orphanage as her main reason. If that was the main reason, then once they find out that Hannah is alive, they should just explain everything. They would have been much less hated had that happened.

I did feel sorry for Hannah. Clearly she got dealt the worst hand. She not only got disowned by her father for marrying a German man, but she subsequently lost both her husband and her baby at the same time putting her into a what I can only describe as a catatonic state. So of course when she gets the first note everyone just thinks she is insane. I can't imagine how helpless she must have been feeling.

Back to Isabelle. Wow, what a horrible human being. The excuses can keep getting stated (her miscarriages, being lonely on the island) but I will still not feel sorry for her. She seemed to have NO remorse until the end, where it was almost too late to help Tom, and then she went in to tell the truth, but just before that she still lies to Hannah to get the child back. When she has a stillbirth she blames in on Tom, and at no point in time does she apologize for that. She also completely freaks out when she thinks that he got a doctor to come to the island to take a look at her. HOW DARE HE? HOW DARE HER LOVING HUSBAND WANT TO TAKE CARE OF HER? I know that in the end she does “the right thing” but that does not erase all the wrong she had done. I would say poor Tom, and sure he also had a crappy situation but clearly he did not do anything to get out of it. He himself could have just sent out for a boat to take the baby back on the second day but he loved his wife too much to take this child away from her.

I feel like there was way too much back story on Hannah's father. I understand that it was added so that he could relate to Lucy but in the end it did not need to be that long and detailed. I found it interesting but then at the end of the book I found myself wondering why that whole chuck was dedicated to him just to bring it back up that one time.

All in all, I loved the description of the scenery but I did not like any of the characters. I could not sympathize with any of them and found them all to be very boring.

I apologized profusely to my book club for picking this book and I don't doubt that this is the worst book they have read all year.

DNF

I read to 1/5 of the book and I put it down and realized I would never pick it back up again. I got that far in it and realized that not much has even happened. I loved Stardust by Gaiman so I figured I would really enjoy this! I was very wrong. There was just way too much descriptions of the surroundings and seemingly useless information. I had no respect for the main character. I generally dislike when it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't and in this book I was just waiting for him to tell me that every single thing he saw was not real. It was just too difficult to continue. I was warned about this book but figured I would give it the benefit of the doubt.