Thursday, November 5, 2015

How to Be Brave~E Katherine Kottaras | Review

Title: How to Be Brave
Author: E Katherine Kottaras
Genre: YA Contemporary
Length: 288 Pages
Release: November 2015
My Rating: 1/5 Stars

I received a copy of this novel through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review
I was extremely excited to read this book when I first saw it on Netgalley. Books with "bucket list" type plots are so fun to me. I don't mind if a lot of the stuff gets repeated, I just like to see the journey and how different characters handle their own to-do lists. So this was an immediate request. I was looking forward to it for ages but didn't want to pick it up too far in advance of the release date.
The first chapter had me questioning whether I wanted to continue with the book. I pushed through, hoping it would improve along the way. Unfortunately, for me, it just fell very short of the mark. I didn't much care for Georgia. She was constantly down on herself and I never really felt like she grew in the story. She made some mistakes and there were life lessons for her to learn, but it didn't really feel like she learned them. 

I was also expecting this book to be focused toward a somewhat younger audience, so the cursing and drug use came as somewhat of a surprise to me. The list was rather different than I expected and it didn't seem like Georgia really spent that much time trying to complete it. 

The writing was ok, but I wasn't extremely impressed. There were poetry like portions where the narrator (Georgia) was mostly explaining how things had been with her mother. I thought this was an interesting style, but it didn't work very well for me. The art aspect was also interesting, I just would have liked to see it more in the story and how Georgia responded to it.

Many people have really enjoyed this book and I'm sure many more will enjoy it also. I was expecting some adventures, facing fears, growing up, learning to love, losing, hurting, all that sort of coming of age stuff. In some ways these elements were present, but they never really reached their full potential.

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