Author: Glendy Vanderah
# of pages: 319 (paperback)
Genre: Adult, Romance, Mystery
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Synopsis: After the untimely deaths of her aunt and mother, young Riley Mays moved from Chicago to her cousins’ Wisconsin farm. Here she found solace in caring for her extraordinary adoptive brother, exploring the surrounding wild nature, and gazing at the mystical moon—a private refuge in which she hides from her most painful memories. But ten years later, now twenty-one, Riley feels too confined by the protective walls she’s erected around herself. When a stranger enters her family’s remote world, Riley senses something he’s hiding, a desire to escape that she understands well. Suffering from writer’s block, bestselling novelist Vaughn Orr has taken to the country roads when he happens upon the accommodating, if somewhat unusual, Mays family. He’s soon captivated by their eccentricities—and especially by Riley and her quiet tenacity. In her, he recognizes a shared need to keep heartbreaking secrets buried.
Review: This was just....not good. I wish I didn't waste the time reading it.
I picked this book on a whim - I saw it on the shelf, didn't know anything about it, and saw it was pretty highly rated on Goodreads (with a low but decent amount of reviews). I only let myself walk out of the building with one book that day, and this one was the lucky winner.
I should have left it on the shelf.
Here's what I liked:
- It was a relatively quick read (with spotty reading sessions, I finished it in a week). The writing and plot is simple enough (+ there is some repetitive points) where you can practically skim it and still get the same experience.
- The cover is pretty, in a simple way. Very ambiguous, definitely some better covers out there (and I bet other designers/artists could have come up with a better cover based on the book), but overall I have no problem with it.
And as for what I didn't like...
The most obvious offender is first person POV switching. I know this is something I am particularly sensitive to a fault about. Sometimes POV switching is justified (although I still believe that every first person POV switching story can be told better from third person and/or without any POV switching). Sometimes the POV switching doesn't even bother me that much because it's not too disruptive to the flow of the story.
This was not one of those books. The POV switching was COMPLETELY unnecessary - it is a prime example of why I STRONGLY dislike it when a story is told like this. The Oceanography of the Moon is told from two perspectives - Riley's and Vaughn's. Throughout most of the book, these two characters are interacting with each other, which means there's A LOT of duplicate information for the reader to slog through.
For example, Riley might mention from her perspective that Vaughn seems to be experience a certain emotion, only for Vaughn to tell us in the very next chapter the EXACT SAME THING but from his perspective. The problem? There is NO new information in doing that. Riley's perspective is good enough, and if it's important to know that she is wrong, then we can find out the same time Riley finds out.
The second offender is the writing itself. I haven't read Vanderah's other books (and based off of this one, I'm not sure I ever will). However, for this book, her writing simply is not believable. Generally, the characters' dialogue does not sound realistic. There's a moment when climate change is mentioned by people who are supposedly passionate about the topic. However, it was mentioned at such a superficial level to the point that I assume Vanderah did not do enough research on climate change to write a character that could convincingly talk about the topic. Additionally, the romantic development is minimal - way too quick for what I would expect based on the characters and the situation they are in.
Now, I can usually be overly critical and tear apart a trashy romance BUT a lot fo the time I still end up enjoying it because I am a HUGE sucker for trashy romance (or of course non-trashy romance). When I realized this book was not well written, I thought to myself - "at least we will get some good romance action later on." NOT. I can usually ignore poor character building if the author is able to convincingly write about two people's relationship with the assumption they are deeply in love with each other. Unfortunately this didn't work either because all the hot and heavy moments (regardless if there was sex or not) fell flat. I was not emotionally engaged at all. Anytime a romantic moment came up it was either not described in enough detail (physically, emotionally, you name it) or it was cut short to chug along with the plot.
The final big offender was the plot. I didn't realize there was even an actual story to read until half way through (I went in blind, didn't read the synopsis), which means this book really lacked focus. The beginning part of the story was so full of fluff and boring. I was not interested in any of these characters nor their backstory and didn't realize that Vanderah intended for the reader to be interested in the mystery of Riley and Vaughn's past until half way in or so. I also was curious on if more would come from the "magic" aspect (no, I didn't even know if this was a sci-fi/fantasy or not, and it was not apparent in the beginning of the story either). On the other hand, the second half of the book read like a soap opera (no spoilers) in the way that soap operas make a bunch of "shocking" reveals and random dramatic things happen at "convenient" times. There was no redeeming section of the book.
I was flip flopping between 1 and 2 stars while I was reading because I wasn't sure if 1 star was too harsh. But by the end, I, not feeling stimulated emotionally nor intellectually by this book, decided that 1 star is appropriate.
Don't read this book; it's not worth your time.
