Emily
This review will have spoilers
I'm happy for Christine, I really am. I used to watch her all the time when I was obsessed with YA.
I have since grown out of it, but that doesn't mean my experience with YA has been erased.
The fact that this book was published tells me that it had nothing to do with good writing or a good story.
It was published because it was guaranteed to make money.
If Christine had not been a booktuber, I don't believe this book would have been published at all.
This book is basically an autobiography, but it's weirder than that...
Shane IS Christine, but Shane comes across as a psychopath.
Pilot has very little personality, he is just a blank canvas for Shane to paint her interests and personality onto.
Spoilers below!
I just want to get right into the nitty-gritty.
After Pilot is stalked at work by Shane, he is rightfully angry when Shane decides, without further discussion, to trap them both in the past in order to rewrite their history together. His anger is short-lived, however. Very quickly he is shown to be completely content with his freewill being stolen from him.
We're told that Melvin and Chad are creepy - as the majority of Christine's readers are and will be female, we're automatically going to dislike these two characters and we will give them no second thought.
However, the stalking of Pilot online and in real life, hijacking of Pilot's life (past and future,) physically hitting and pushing Pilot throughout the entire book is overlooked because we see a young blonde, blue-eyed, bubbly girl in our heads as we read the book, we see Christine.
Some of the conversations between Pilot and Shane go nowhere, ever. They often feel like conversations Pilot is trapped in, he will either agree with what she is saying or ask her to elaborate so that we can have a paragraph dedicated to her knowledge about Harry Potter, romantic comedies, TFIOS, Lost, and anything else Christine- I mean, Shane is obsessed with.
Chapter 20 annoyed me to no end.
Upon discovering the Pilot's breakup message never got through to his girlfriend, Shane reprimands him, asking “What kind of person doesn't wait for confirmation that their significant other actually acknowledged that they've broken up with them?”
This line of dialogue felt hypocritical to me.
I can't help but feel that she is still technically cheating on Melvin regardless of where she is in time. She had not broken up with him in the future. Not that any of that matters, really.
Five minutes later, she tells Pilot that “This isn't working for me anymore.” and threatens to push the button on the twisted journey that Pilot had no say in to begin with. Shane doesn't like the person she's become while being in a relationship with Pilot and says she's been “acting like a distracted teenager.”
The truth is that Shane has been acting like a distracted teenager since the beginning.
Shane presses the button anyway, ignoring the agreement she and Pilot made to discuss it completely before it is ever pressed.
Let's recap:
Stalked and emotionally abused Pilot is angry about being dragged back to the past. Shane finds the button to bring them back to the future, Pilot immediately wants to press it so he can return to his life, rightfully so. Shane convinces him otherwise for her own benefit, essentially trapping him in the past against his will initially.
Pilot finally accepts his situation and finds that it has been worth it.
Shane doesn't like the fact that she texts him all the time and lost one of many potential job opportunities and decides that it's over between them, that “here is hurting me. I need to choose me.”
SHE has opportunities in 2017, SHE has money saved in 2017. Pilot apparently had absolutely nothing in 2017 worth staying there for.
Sadly for me, we aren't transported back to 2017 and the story continues.
We remain in 2011 with Pilot stuck in limbo and heartbroken while Shane happily continues to work on herself and her internship.
Everything works out in the end anyway, because why wouldn't it.
Final thoughts:
This book was not good for me, and I doubt I will purchase anything else she writes. It wouldn't be fair to me as a reader or Christine as an author since I am no longer a YA reader.
I am glad, though, that Christine is in the position to be able to actualise her writing career. I hope that once she gets the strange autobiographical fiction out of her system, her writing can mature over time.
I'm happy for her that there are people out there that enjoyed the book.
COLLEEN!!! You consistently make me read your books in one sitting.
This book had me bawling my eyes out to my boyfriend.
As an Aussie, I'm always happy to hear about new Australian authors busting their way out of our dry bubble.
I feel like the book is a little overrated, though.
There was not enough suspense building up to the reveal of who the killer was, nor was there enough character development for the killer for me to care when it was revealed.
This may seem nitpicky, but barely anyone in the book was reacting in a convincing way to the heat of Australia. When it is 40+ degrees and you're in the middle of a drought, it is unbearable. You feel like you're barely able to function. The sweat, the flies, the heat makes the wind feel so thick that you feel like you're going to suffocate just from breathing it in. The book is called The Dry, I would have thought the heat of the harsh land would play a bigger part in the book or almost became a character itself.
The character of Aaron Falk was dull, there was little personality to him in my opinion, although maybe he is more alive in the next book. I just wish he was written better in my first introduction to him.
Overall, I think this book was okay for a debut. For me, the interesting characters in the book were already dead.
I might read the next in the series just to see if Aaron is still boring.
I WAS IN A READING SLUMP FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR, THEN I PICKED UP THIS BOOK.
I FINISHED THIS BOOK IN ONE SITTING.
If you absolutely NEED something to read to pull you out of a slump, this is it.
I laughed, I cried, I squealed, I was conflicted.
This is my first Colleen Hoover book, and I am hooked.
I am completely speechless. This book is incredible from start to finish. It's like nothing I've ever experienced before, READ THIS SHIT
Everybody seems to be terrified by this book. I found it to be rather boring and predictable... I must have rolled my eyes a thousand times.
I didn't care about the characters, and the writing wasn't that great.
Maybe the hype got to me and I expected a lot more.
2019 re-read.
I first read this in 2016 and I LOVED it. On my second read though I can identify more problems with it than I had initially realised.
This entire book had me on a rollercoaster...
There were a few small parts that made me tear up.
Cassie was tough, I loved her in the beginning.
Then Evan shows up.
He volunteers as a servant to Cassie, and Cassie became a queen real quick.
She was shot in the leg, wasn't she? Explain to me why it was “too soon” for her to wash her own hair...
My feelings changed a little though once Evan was explained.
I ended up understanding why he would think Cassie couldn't survive without him. It made more sense now that I know he's not just some ordinary stalker farmboy.
In the end though, I came to like it! But not as much as I thought I would.
A little disappointed.
There is nothing that couldn't have been explained when it came to Willem's side of the story in a proper sequel. There didn't need to be an entire book told from his perspective.
If there had been a proper sequel, we could've watched him explain everything, because that's exactly what he would've done anyway. Readers would've found it out that way.
What the second book needed was a continuation of their lives after the first one, after they found each other.
I didn't need to be told twice that they found each other.