Reviews

A Constellation of Minor Bears by Jen Ferguson

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kristireads's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

olivias's review against another edition

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3.0

I started out loving this book, but felt like it just kind of lost momentum for me as it went on. Agree with many of the comments above, and I particularly liked the exploration of Molly and Hank's changing relationship around their complicated reactions to his accident and resulting disability. I loved the PCT aspect of the book (I loved Wild so already knew a bit about the trail. I'm curious if those who weren't familiar with it had any difficulty following along with the concept of it and terms like "trail angels", or if it was self-explanatory). I loved Those Pink Mountain Nights a few years ago, and do agree with Diana that I thought that one was a little stronger, although this one feels more YA to me.

Generally I love Ferguson's writing, but I noticed in Pink Mountain Nights as well that sometimes I find this author's writing a bit hard to follow. I'm able to figure out what she means, but there are definitely sentences and paragraphs that I re-read several times, and just couldn't really parse her phrasing or what exactly she was saying. This might be a writing style or language use/dialect type of thing, and maybe others don't have this issue. I do find it distracting though and quite frequent.

I found the jumping between perspectives, particularly Molly to Tray to be a bit jarring. I think this is partly because I was getting very engaged in the storylines, which is a good thing, but sometimes I would be several paragraphs into a new chapter before I remembered that it was a different perspective and had to go back and re-read. I also found the changing dynamics of the relationship between Molly and Tray to get a bit old. I appreciate that the story explored the ways that romance and love are not mutually exclusive and that romantic love isn't perfect, but I started feeling confused and annoyed by the end of it in terms of what they were doing and what they each thought they were doing, which rarely felt clear or aligned to me. The nicknames for Molly also felt overdone.

The interludes about song were a cool idea, but just didn't land for me, and again, felt like I couldn't fully understand the writing. Similarly the bear references felt a bit heavy-handed and never really came full circle for me.

I think the end just felt a bit like it was just playing out things that had already been discussed to death or thought about to death in the characters' minds, so I kind of lost the interest I felt at the beginning. I still enjoyed reading it, and thought there were really important things covered, I just feel like it kind of fizzled out for me.

thestarsaligned's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

rylieee's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional lighthearted sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

enbyreader's review against another edition

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2.0

I still don't know what a minor bear is.

I feel bad giving this book 2 stars, because I'm all for diverse books and representation, but that shouldn't come at the expense of plot and basic character development. I don't feel like the main cast really grew as people over the course of the plot, which is a basic thing I look for in a book. This book really dragged in the middle - once Hank shows up on the trail, nothing substa tial changes for about 150 pages. The conflict between Molly and Tray, and Molly and Hank, got extremely repetitive. Sometimes they'd seem to forgive each other and be fine, and then the next chapter Molly was angry again for no reason. When Brynn joined the group, I thought she would cause the other three to develop as characters, but once she left, they just went right back to who they were before. Honestly, if this book were about Brynn and the main cast were background characters to HER story, it would've been a lot more interesting.

The dialogue was weird, like the author never met a teenager and wrote what she THOUGHT teenagers talk like after hearing about teenagers secondhand. The characters are so vague in their communications with each other - at one point, Molly says to Tray, "It is still bad." And I had no idea what she was talking about! I was 80+ pages in! It was like one of those hour-long TV shows where the plot could be resolved by two people having a 30-second conversation. This whole book felt like it could've been a novella, 100 pages max. I also had a hard time with my suspension of disbelief that the four hikers wander into a tiny town and somehow find two LGBT teens to hang out with right away. At that point the representation felt incredibly forced. Come to think of it, how were these teenagers' parents fine with their kids going off and hanging out with four other teens they'd never met, let alone spending a night in a hotel with these strangers??? This is a trail town, hikers come into town all the time - it makes no sense.

Between some chapters, there are short interjections of the components of a song, which are also somehow stars in a constellation. I'm not sure what that was supposed to be about, because it didn't seem to connect to the story at all.

Overall, I guess all I can say is that I was disappointed.