Monday, May 13, 2013

Flora, by Gail Godwin

What a day it's been! Just kidding. I woke up at 10:30 and have done a good deal of nothing so far. Pretty exciting stuff, I know! Today, I really spent an hour or so thinking about all the things I was going to have to do to begin getting ready for the baby shower next month. Cheese and Rice, I got overwhelmed and walked away from the whole setup of planning. I at least set a date, and let people know about it! Baby steps, right? Haha. So when I gave up on the planning I decided that it was also a good time to go get my nails and eyebrows done. Living the high life! It's becoming more and more apparent that I am beginning to have big problems with focus. Yeah. I'll be doing something, and then out of no where "SHINY" distractions. Fairly certain that you can equate this stage of the pregnancy to a form of dimensia. Mostly, I'm just hoping that this mental state doesn't begin to effect my reading beyond the amount of time I am able to spend reading before I have to walk away.

Flora was one of those books that, on a normal occasion, should have been done in pretty much a single sitting. Do I blame the baby, or do I blame the story!? On Goodreads the story has an average reader rating of 3.49 out of 5 stars, and I'll just give it a three myself. This means that I'll blame the story. It's a brand new book that came out on May 7th, which I didn't realize at the time that I started reading it. All I knew was that it was on hold because it hadn't been released in ebook format on the library's website until then. 

The story is about a ten year old girl who loses her grandma and then her father goes off to work for the summer, leaving her cousin from Alabama in charge of her. Most of the story was pretty bland, and the little girl, Helen, was an obnoxious, pretentious girl. Flora on the other hand is the slightly uneducated cousin who lacks self-confidence in anything she does. It doesn't take long for Helen to realize that she can play this to her advantage in some things. The story overall was slow and uninviting, but how inviting could a book about two girls essentially stuck on a mountain for a whole summer be? 

The ending of the book seemed to be trying to make up for the lack of content throughout the rest of it. There was a major onslaught of information that came all sorts of jumbled to give the reader a sort of satisfaction of knowing what ended up happening to everyone. Most of these tidbits I found to be sorely lacking in any necessity. Why do we need to know what happened to so many of the supporting characters? Just didn't make sense to me why. Nor did it flow well. Almost made the story end even more abruptly. 

I'll keep Gail Godwin on the list of authors I can pull from when I need something to fill my time, but as of right now I think I'll walk away from this book and leave it at that. I'm not really certain what I'll be reading next, but I'm hoping it's much better than the last couple of things I've picked up. My luck needs to come back in!

Until we meet again readers, I wish you all the best.

Happy Reading.

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