Saturday, May 18, 2013

The Different Girl by Gordon Dahlquist


"Four nearly identical girls on a desert island. An unexpected new arrival. A gently warped near future where nothing is quite as it seems.

Veronika. Caroline. Isobel. Eleanor. One blond, one brunette, one redhead, one with hair black as tar. Four otherwise identical girls who spend their days in sync, tasked to learn. But when May, a very different kind of girl—the lone survivor of a recent shipwreck—suddenly and mysteriously arrives on the island, an unsettling mirror is about to be held up to the life the girls have never before questioned."

So...meh. This one went fast, which worked for me. I mean, it was fine enough...which is the problem. It didn't actually get to the point where I wanted to keep reading it. Not much happened for quite some time in the book, then when it did (namely May arriving), it wasn't all that groundbreaking. I'd say the best thing this book had going for it was the imagery and introspection/world examination that the girls did (for their lessons, they were tasked with basically walking around and observing everything), which were interesting. That came in this big chunk though; it lasted about the first third of the book, and that's all that happened for that time. Got a little strung out. The ending was kinda weirdly anti-climactic, too (I think it was supposed to come off as climactic, but it didn't do anything for me).  I don't know--I'm now pretty sure this is a middle-school-age book, so I can't really tell if it'd be good to someone that age. Wasn't my thing, but, hey. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt...It's at Kettleson.

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