Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Wildlife by Fiona Wood

Note: I received a free advanced copy of “Wildlife” by Fiona Wood from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I requested “Wildlife”, a story about two teenage girls named Sibylla and Lou and their school term at an outdoor education program, I did not realize that it’s basically a sequel to another book that featured Lou. I actually didn’t realize that until now, over a week after I finished the book, when I happened to see that it was listed as ‘book 2’ on Goodreads.

Now I know that sometimes it doesn’t really seem to matter whether or not you’ve read the first book and I doubt it would have changed “Wildlife” all that much for me but I think it might have helped enough for me to rate this a bit higher.

I enjoyed the duel perspectives, the naïve Sibylla and Lou who had experienced so much (most likely in the first book I’m guessing) although at first I didn’t pick up on the whole multiple narrator thing and was very confused. Which was probably pretty stupid of me since some chapters were written in diary form while others were just first person but since narrator names weren’t mentioned for a few pages I got lost.

What I did like about the story was that some parts of it were very realistic. Lou’s depression was understandable and I liked that she merely isolated herself and observed instead of behaving more erratically like fictional characters often seem to do. But where I liked Lou I found Sibylla very flip floppy. Sometimes she had some great common sense and observations while other times, whenever her best friend and her new boyfriend were involved, she was horribly naïve.

All in all it wasn’t a bad story but it wasn’t really all that amazing either. Not much happened and I didn’t get pulled into the characters as much as I have in other books though I did like bits and pieces of the character’s personalities.

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