Scott Maynard

I find it mildly concerning that the grade 9 learners at my high-school including myself were made to read this book as our serwork for the year. At first I found the book to be fascinating in the opening chapter or two, it left me wondering how an extremist group could treat others of their same species in such ways. This is after covering World War 2 in History as well so I've heard of and read about many of the horrendous acts which were performed by the Nazi group. Though as the book went on, I found dialogue to sprint past at a pace which made me wonder how such events were even organized, I found the book to be getting more fictional as time went on, and don't even get me started on how quickly many of the scenes seemed to pass by. Sitting on either the back of the book or somewhere within, there is a line of text which resides in a paragraph about the author. The paragraph reads something along the lines of "Heather Morris has taken the powerful story of Lale Sokolov and has turned it into an international bestseller without letting the plot of love drive the story into fiction." Now I shall say that the paragraph which I have just shown is correct! The love story didn't in fact take the story to highly fictional levels, because the loves story itself seemed too fast-paced to be real, which is scary because the love story did in fact happen! It wasn't the love story which was fictional, it was in fact everything else. I shall end my review with this: I understand that you might have been trying to appeal to a wider audience with a shorter book and less complicated writing, but please slow down. I would like to be able to understand where I am, and say with confidence "I believe this happened." My mother and girlfriend would like to read the book as well so I shall await their further opinions, though I believe that the story had so much more potential, and could have turned out many times better if taken by a different author. 2/5