Take a photo of a barcode or cover
2.69 AVERAGE
2.69 AVERAGE
emotional
mysterious
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Read, read, read, read!!! I finished this book in two days because I could NOT put the book down. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time just wanting to know what happened to Abby and what will happen to Rhylee.
"I wasn't naive enough to think gossip just disappeared. It rose and fell like waves, some days crashing down on you so hard it was almost impossible to stay on your feet and other times a gentle lull that tricked you into believing everyone had moved on to something new" (Alpine 216).
"I wasn't naive enough to think gossip just disappeared. It rose and fell like waves, some days crashing down on you so hard it was almost impossible to stay on your feet and other times a gentle lull that tricked you into believing everyone had moved on to something new" (Alpine 216).
What can I say about this book?... It did not turn out like I excepted. In my mind, it took a hard left fast. I was thinking it would be like 'Dangerous Girls' or similar. Where the boyfriend or a friend did end up killing her. But all this paranormal and sic-fi stuff, was not excepted.
Not knowing what happened to Abby, is not a surprise. That happens a lot. Families are left without answers all the time. That didn't bother me, I'm bothered by not knowing what was going on with Rhylee and the nights of someone standing outside her window shining a light into her room. Or her sisters pictures being ripped off the wall. I don't understand any of that. And it wasn't ever explained. At least she explained the circles in the field next to the Towers house, Abby's friends made them in tribute to her. But the other stuff never was explained and I'm still reeling from it and want to know what the heck it all meant.
In the end, this book was not what I was thinking it would be.
Not knowing what happened to Abby, is not a surprise. That happens a lot. Families are left without answers all the time. That didn't bother me, I'm bothered by not knowing what was going on with Rhylee and the nights of someone standing outside her window shining a light into her room. Or her sisters pictures being ripped off the wall. I don't understand any of that. And it wasn't ever explained. At least she explained the circles in the field next to the Towers house, Abby's friends made them in tribute to her. But the other stuff never was explained and I'm still reeling from it and want to know what the heck it all meant.
In the end, this book was not what I was thinking it would be.
2.5 -Great concept idea, but characters felt flat especially considering the emotional trauma they went through.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I read this book under a drug induced haze thanks to a bout of tonsillitis. However, now that the haze has lifted, I don’t remember much of what I read. I wonder if I can’t access the memory since my state of mind was altered during the encoding or whether it wasn’t even encoded to begin with. Whatever it is, take my subsequent thoughts with a massive pinch of salt!
A Void the Size of the World by Rachele Alpine follows Rhylee as she makes some phenomenal mistakes typical of the teenage years. What follows is a tragedy that Rhylee cannot help but feel responsible for. Still, life goes on and she and her family and community find a way to work through their grief.
This is distinctly a young adult read, what with the formulaic short chapters, hyper focus on the self, and impulsive and emotional characters. The structure makes for an easy read because the repeated point-emotion-impact sentence format of the chapters really guided the mind through the book. I didn’t find it too repetitive but that might have been because of above mentioned haze. Who knows how I’ll feel about it if I had read it now.
I wasn’t a fan of all the characters because of their impulsivity and poor decision making. Yet, it felt very realistic, to have such behavior from the teenagers and the grief stricken adults. We can’t think clearly either way.
I did, however, appreciate how Alpine navigated the difficult topic of grief and how each person may have a different way of approaching it. There are those who self-flagellate and others who seek comfort from blind pursuit. There really is no right way and there are repercussions from each way. The most anyone can do, is to put one foot in front of the other, and keep living and loving the way they can.
Diversity meter:
-
Reading time: 3 days.
Star Rating: 2 stars
I really wanted to like this book. I did. But it was rough. The plot sounded good enough and the small synopsis on the jacket made it mysterious enough that I wanted to know what happened.
A Void the Size of the World is about a girl named Rhylee, who has lived her life in her sister, Abby's, shadow. Abby is a track star and basically the star of the town. And then she disappears, because of Rhylee.
Rhylee kissed her sister's boyfriend, Tommy, who is also Rhylee's childhood friend and she's been in love with him for most of their friendship. However, he dates her sister after Rhylee rejects him.
The high school is at this bonfire in the woods somewhere and Tommy and Rhylee end up kissing for the second time, but this time Abby catches them. After a short fight with them, she runs into the woods and disappears.
That's basically the book right there. A girl disappears and never comes back. The biggest problem I had with this book, is there is absolutely no closure. Abby disappears, her family crumbles and loses who they are as they look for and mourn Abby. But, that's all. They never find out what exactly happened to Abby and why she never came back.
The police find a sweatshirt in the woods she ran into, footprints by the side of the river that matched a shoe at the bottom of the lake they searched later. So, her family as well as the cops assume she fell and ended up in the lake?
And Rhylee basically lies her way through the whole. damn. book. Neither she or Tommy told the cops about why Abby ran off into the woods. Even when Tommy is blamed for what happened to Abby and the whole school turns against him, Rhylee says nothing. She keeps lying and feeling sorry for herself, because she blames herself for what happened to her sister. It's hard to root for her when she just keeps on lying to literally everyone she knows and shuts them all out, even Tommy. And then when he wants to leave to get away from it all, she has the audacity to beg him to stay.
And then there's crop circles that show up, making it seem that something paranormal happened to Abby, which later you find out was just her cross-country team trying to make some kind of tribute to her. But, after they show up, weird things happen to Rhylee where she's chasing figures in the dark and posters from her wall are torn down that are again, unexplained and completely unresolved.
I kept reading this book because I just wanted to find out what the hell happened to Abby and in hope she would make it home, but no. No closure. No happy ending. Absolutely no satisfaction. Nothing. Just a completely open ending where Abby's family all of the sudden turns everything around in the last chapter and accepts the fact that she's not coming back after 83 chapters of denial.
That's the other thing I will vent about. There's 84 chapters in this book. There's not even 400 pages, and there's 84 chapters. I just thought that it was so excessive and the chapters were so short, it became annoying. At first, I liked the fact the chapters were short, because I felt like I was making my way through the book pretty quickly, but it got old fast. Some chapters were literally a paragraph and a lot of them were choppy.
There was a lot of repetitiveness to the writing as well, which I did not take into consideration for the rating, but I will still talk about it. Lots of scenes were repeated where Rhylee felt sorry for herself and wouldn't stop blaming herself for what happened to her sister. Scenes and lines were repeated throughout the whole book. There were sentences almost word for word that were repeated. It would have been a little better if they were a few chapters apart (which, in this case, could have been like five pages), but they were two pages apart, the exact same sentence and phrasing, word for word. I know it's difficult to write, but that shouldn't happen with any book. That's just my opinion though, which is why I didn't reflect it in my rating, just my review.
Anyway, if you want to be frustrated, annoyed and completely unsatisfied, this is the book for you.
Star Rating: 2 stars
I really wanted to like this book. I did. But it was rough. The plot sounded good enough and the small synopsis on the jacket made it mysterious enough that I wanted to know what happened.
A Void the Size of the World is about a girl named Rhylee, who has lived her life in her sister, Abby's, shadow. Abby is a track star and basically the star of the town. And then she disappears, because of Rhylee.
Rhylee kissed her sister's boyfriend, Tommy, who is also Rhylee's childhood friend and she's been in love with him for most of their friendship. However, he dates her sister after Rhylee rejects him.
The high school is at this bonfire in the woods somewhere and Tommy and Rhylee end up kissing for the second time, but this time Abby catches them. After a short fight with them, she runs into the woods and disappears.
That's basically the book right there. A girl disappears and never comes back. The biggest problem I had with this book, is there is absolutely no closure. Abby disappears, her family crumbles and loses who they are as they look for and mourn Abby. But, that's all. They never find out what exactly happened to Abby and why she never came back.
The police find a sweatshirt in the woods she ran into, footprints by the side of the river that matched a shoe at the bottom of the lake they searched later. So, her family as well as the cops assume she fell and ended up in the lake?
And Rhylee basically lies her way through the whole. damn. book. Neither she or Tommy told the cops about why Abby ran off into the woods. Even when Tommy is blamed for what happened to Abby and the whole school turns against him, Rhylee says nothing. She keeps lying and feeling sorry for herself, because she blames herself for what happened to her sister. It's hard to root for her when she just keeps on lying to literally everyone she knows and shuts them all out, even Tommy. And then when he wants to leave to get away from it all, she has the audacity to beg him to stay.
And then there's crop circles that show up, making it seem that something paranormal happened to Abby, which later you find out was just her cross-country team trying to make some kind of tribute to her. But, after they show up, weird things happen to Rhylee where she's chasing figures in the dark and posters from her wall are torn down that are again, unexplained and completely unresolved.
I kept reading this book because I just wanted to find out what the hell happened to Abby and in hope she would make it home, but no. No closure. No happy ending. Absolutely no satisfaction. Nothing. Just a completely open ending where Abby's family all of the sudden turns everything around in the last chapter and accepts the fact that she's not coming back after 83 chapters of denial.
That's the other thing I will vent about. There's 84 chapters in this book. There's not even 400 pages, and there's 84 chapters. I just thought that it was so excessive and the chapters were so short, it became annoying. At first, I liked the fact the chapters were short, because I felt like I was making my way through the book pretty quickly, but it got old fast. Some chapters were literally a paragraph and a lot of them were choppy.
There was a lot of repetitiveness to the writing as well, which I did not take into consideration for the rating, but I will still talk about it. Lots of scenes were repeated where Rhylee felt sorry for herself and wouldn't stop blaming herself for what happened to her sister. Scenes and lines were repeated throughout the whole book. There were sentences almost word for word that were repeated. It would have been a little better if they were a few chapters apart (which, in this case, could have been like five pages), but they were two pages apart, the exact same sentence and phrasing, word for word. I know it's difficult to write, but that shouldn't happen with any book. That's just my opinion though, which is why I didn't reflect it in my rating, just my review.
Anyway, if you want to be frustrated, annoyed and completely unsatisfied, this is the book for you.
I wish there was an option to say "I gave up on this book" but this book was so terrible I could not even finish it. It got real weird after being an uninteresting slough.
I received this through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
Rhylee has always loved the boy next door. He was the only thing that she could claim as hers, outside the shadow of her perfect sister, Abby. However, because Rhylee wasn't quick enough to act, Abby claimed Tommy as her boyfriend. The two are the perfect popular couple, but Rhylee and Tommy have feelings for each other. When Abby catches Rhylee and Tommy kissing, she disappears. The town is in an uproar looking for their perfect kid. People are desperate for miracles, but Rhylee is desperate to get rid of the guilt she feels about her sister's disappearance.
This was a standard teen drama. It had some weird twists with things like crop circles and potential supernatural sightings. I think the emotional fallout and lies needed to be better explored and addressed, but overall it was an interesting quick read.
Rhylee has always loved the boy next door. He was the only thing that she could claim as hers, outside the shadow of her perfect sister, Abby. However, because Rhylee wasn't quick enough to act, Abby claimed Tommy as her boyfriend. The two are the perfect popular couple, but Rhylee and Tommy have feelings for each other. When Abby catches Rhylee and Tommy kissing, she disappears. The town is in an uproar looking for their perfect kid. People are desperate for miracles, but Rhylee is desperate to get rid of the guilt she feels about her sister's disappearance.
This was a standard teen drama. It had some weird twists with things like crop circles and potential supernatural sightings. I think the emotional fallout and lies needed to be better explored and addressed, but overall it was an interesting quick read.
This book was so good. I literally couldn’t put it down.
My first initial impression of A Void The Size Of The World by Rachele Alpine was that it was going to be a contemporary YA book that’s part thriller, part dealing with grief. My impression was wrong, as it turns out. And that’s not exactly a great thing. I really had some expectations but this book just did not live up to those expectations.Read my full review here