Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I have a rule that you shouldn't judge a book until you've read enough to have truly given it a chance. Typically, I'll stick with something until the halfway point. Perhaps it's some type of book optimism but I like to think that it will get better if I stick with it.
This book was so bad that I've changed that from a rule to a guideline. There was simply no way that I could endure half of this book. Here's the deal - there is a girl that spent her childhood being awkward and bullied. She re-invented herself at some point, losing weight, gaining an appearance of confidence, tweaking her name and changing schools. You also read that she had an equally unliked friend that moved and apparently died. It's just as clear that she is just pretending to be confident, that her friend had been abused and that she is weirdly, compulsively, obsessively fixated on this past friend. She cannot function, pay attention to friends or even remember her current life. And the obvious idea of opening her mouth and asking the questions she wonders about is so clearly above her intelligence that she is unable to even think of it.
I couldn't think of a single, compelling reason to finish this book. I didn't care what happened to any of them. I didn't see any point of reading the details of the abuse that other readers seem to think was a huge secret. The characters were extremely unlikeable. As a short (very short!) story this might have been tolerable.
View all my reviews
