May was a good month. Where I live started to lift some of the restrictions which allowed my husband I to travel to the mountains. I finished our May book club choice Serenade (2017) there. Coincidentally, the book we read also takes place in those same mountains. It was the world working out just nicely for a change. I've also settled into working from home a little bit more. Its still not my favourite, but it's a bit better now. Feeling more productive than previously.
Serenade is the first in a trilogy that centers around a girl who is raised in a castle in the mountains. She always has to fear for her life due to her father being a very rich man that everyone hates. When she is 18 she is kidnapped and as she starts to develop feelings for her captor, her life and everything she thought she knew starts unravel. Classic young adult tropes abound!
The ratings for this book were pretty decent, but I did not rate it very high. I think I gave it a 2 out of 10. Mostly because I found the first person point-of-view usage really wonky, the writing wasn't the greatest, the story was more plot than character driven (a problem we all brought up) and the YA romance part of it was SO forced and cheesy and just no. Not a fan.
The majority of our discussion revolved around the poor development of the characters. They weren't believable and a bit un-relatable. The question of if the good guys were really good or were they bad and were the bad guys the good guys came up a lot, because it just seemed so unreal. So many of the characters were unlikable and we agreed that we only liked three: Angela, Davis and Stefan. Which, out of the many characters there were, was saying something. Especially since none of those three were even the leads.
I made mention of the point-of-view issue and I'll elaborate further. It was first person POV, so okay, that's fine; I can get behind first-person if its done well. This book was not. Not only was it poorly written first person that made it really hard to connect to the main character, but then it also switched between characters and also had them in first person! The other two being the male leads and they were WAY too similar in tone and inner-voice and honestly it was so hard to keep track of who was who if it wasn't for the chapter/section titles. I personally think that if you're going to have multiple character POVs and want to showcase their opinions and motives then do third person narration. It makes things so much smoother and I might have liked this book a little more.
Another thing that got us all up in arms was the glossing over of details. Not major details, but like details that would have rounded out the story better, added character depth and development and tied things together more. Leaving details out to induce intrigue make sense, but not in the way this book did. It could have been done so much better. Which brings me to the pacing of the book. There was a lot of lead-up that made sense but was sporadic, then came the big Death Race (which we all agreed was the best part) and then the kidnapping. It seemed to jump forward through time a lot, when it could have been focused on the race and the kidnapping and all the lead up could have been memories or even flashbacks perhaps. It just seemed jumbled at the start.
I feel like I'm just nit-picking at this point, but things about this book just bugged me. Carmen put it the best: "Its a young adult novel, meant for around 18-year-olds. Would your 18-year-old self have liked this book?" Lynette said yes. I would say no. This is not the type of stuff I was reading at 18 in the past already, so for me it was unlikely. But we all laughed at how funny it was that all of us in our 30s were ripping this book a new one. However, we all like young adult novels, but there are just so many more out there that are much better than this one.
We concluded with saying that although we may not have liked the book, we didn't feel like we wasted our time reading it. There was enough there to keep us reading to the end, but not enough for us to overly enjoy it and want to keep reading the rest of the trilogy.
UP NEXT: Our June book is The Sundial. I'm intrigued by this book as it is not a book I would have picked up on my own. I'm not much for the macabre, spooky, scary or horror genre... not that I really know what genre this book is. Anyways, I'm still interested in reading it because the premise sounds quite neat.
