I just finished a book for my personal diversity challenge titled, "How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House" by Cherie Jones. It was a real struggle for me to read, but it was short (less than 300 pages), and I refused to put it down. I looked it up when I was having one particularly difficult reading session, and found that it was a "book of the month" from Good Morning America. I watched the video clip of their introduction of it, and they all seemed very excited to read it. My review is on Goodreads, and I will add it shortly to BubblyBibbly.com, so I won't go into the actual book here.
What the point of this post is: do you feel that you have missed something that other readers have seen when you dislike a book that everyone else really likes? That is what I am feeling now. Which is odd because, when I finished "Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine" by Gail Honeyman, I felt quite content with my dislike of the story. I knew exactly why everyone else liked it, and why I did not. And maybe it's because those two things were the same that I had peace with my review.
In this case, however, I watched a few interviews with the author, and those conducting the interviews simply fawned over the storytelling in the book. I don't know what they loved. I can tell you what left me feeling flat and unfulfilled as the reader, but I have no idea what others saw as compelling parts of the story. That always makes me feel like I have missed some hidden gem that reeled others in.
But then, I think, "Hey, you can't like them all. You have an opinion just like everyone else. It's just that it's not exactly like everyone else's." (haha - see what I did there?)
Happy Reading!
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