Twists and turns

Yeah, I finally finished 'Dreaming Of Amelia'.

Hmmm ... I liked that the kids in the book seemed to act like 17 year olds, Jaclyn got that right, but ...

... you know when you're reading something, and something feels forced? Like, the author's realised maybe the story's going nowhere, or there isn't enough excitement in the book? Or they've been ambling along for 400 pages and realised they have to get this all down on paper and the last ten pages are crammed full of action, at the expense of accuracy?

That's DOA. I can't place my finger quite on what was off about it. A lot of characters were over-the-top, which made a good guise for a shoddy plot twist. But it makes it hard to choose what unsettles me about the writer.

And she wrote with an agenda, like I hate. Part of it was the whole 'leaving school, going to uni, saying goodbye to childhood' sort of things, like 'you'll be okay in the real world!' blahblahblah. Part of it was 'I heard this brilliant story about a local place, I'm going to write it down and thread it into my fiction. You're going to love the history lecture. In fact, you'll love it so much, I'll make the characters randomly time travel at the end'.

I think, if the idea had been executed in another style, in third person maybe, without the juvenile tint to the wording, it would've been a good book. The second message would have worked in an almost Donnie Darko sort of way. But it didn't so it wasn't.

And now I'm back to picking a book. Or writing mine, lol.

I need to work on my synopsis. God it's effing hard.