Garden-of-Stars

I feel like I really missed something after finishing this book. In fact, I feel somewhat…cheated. I’ve been looking for this book for such a long time, and when I couldn’t buy myself a copy I decided to settle for taking it out of the library. However I ended up feeling extremely glad I took a copy from the library instead of buying one for myself since otherwise I would’ve greatly regretted it. “Some Quiet Place” was not what I hoped nor expected it to be, and ended up becoming another tally in a sequence of hit-and-misses that I’ve been going through lately.

Like most people I was drawn by the summary. The idea of personified emotions and elements actually reminded me of a piece of writing I’ve been working on on-and-off for the past several years already, and as the summary sounded a lot like what I was working on it made me curious to see where the author decided to take the concept. But quickly a number of issues began to arise.

I’ve never been a huge lover of small-town settings, especially after having visited some myself. But after beginning to read “Some Quiet Place”, I had a really big dislike develop for the town of Edson. It’s not so much the author’s fault as it is my own personal taste, and I feel like that really changed the way in which I went through the book. I didn’t relate to the small-town mentality where everyone knew each other’s business and Elizabeth couldn’t just admit to the counsellor what was going on in her life with her parents.

Which brings me to Elizabeth and the whole plot in general. The first half of the book I had to force myself to sit down and focus on what I was reading, often with little success. Elizabeth’s voice, her repetition of how she didn’t have any feelings and how people treated her like an alien and that was completely understandable, it became too much after a certain point. She became difficult to sympathize with, and the circular nature of the plot and the details really hyped up the tension in the story while at the same time making it very tangled. I found Fear to be an interesting character and I enjoyed the way he was made to be double sided, but I couldn’t click in with the romance. I still didn’t get the whole story about Rebecca and Landen and what exactly the big deal about it was, and as a result the book caved in on itself for me. The Emotions and Elements were a very cool but equally fleeting detail that somehow got sucked up in a vortex of confusion that the author opened up.

It ended up a case of lost potential, I think. Probably due to my dislike and disconnection with the main character I found most of the book to be redundant, repetitive, and boring. The romance wasn’t taken full advantage of, as it could have been a very unique and healthy examples of a YA relationship. The “big reveal” wasn’t very big and came out flat in the end after a confusing and lengthy lead-up that was overly suspenseful. I can tell the author really wanted to create an enticing story with another deliciously appealing forbidden romance, but it didn’t work, at least not for me. There were too many holes and the writing could’ve been more polished. There was something missing from the story that left it a jumbled clump in the end.