Girl Out of Water by Laura Silverman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I was given this ARC by NetGalley in return for an honest review.
I am aware of the circumstances surrounding this book and the author and my sole purpose is to honestly review this story after having read it in its entirety.
I had to take a two-day break from reading this story and needed a lot of encouragement from my husband and mom to finish it, because about half way through the book I felt like giving up for good, without possibility of reconsideration. But their encouragement worked wonders. I was intrigued to read a young adult contemporary novel about a sporty young woman, facing personal challenges. Sadly, I am not sure what the point of this story was.
The main character, with her personal problems and weaknesses I thought could have been a perfect character for great personal development; however, not much development ever did occur. And the secondary characters were all very well thought out to cater to the main character’s whims.
The writing was easy flowing enough to keep me going, even when it got almost too much to bear. Also, for almost 300 pages the author kept repeating that the main character lived in Santa Cruz, loved Santa Cruz, surfed in Santa Cruz, had her friends in Santa Cruz, misses Santa Cruz, and so on and so forth. It got extremely tiresome to keep reading about it.
The plot would have been great, if it hadn’t been created around those whims of the main character. It felt like the author was too scared to have the main character actually face real challenges and situations that would force her to change. Every time I thought the main character finally had to face the fact that life can not always be peachy, the plot magically twisted in such a way to make it easier for her. It got monotonous very quickly. Also, no action taken by the main character ever had any consequences, which made this entire story even more unrealistic.
Overall, I wanted to give this story a one-star rating, but changed my mind to rate it two-stars, since it could still be entertaining in a fluff-don’t-take-it-too-seriously-beach-read kind of way.
