A review by brandypainter
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera

3.0

I guess I'm going to be one of the very tiny minority who didn't love this. I get why its themes of the importance of story memory and the dangers of conformity lit up the Newbery committee. Those are the things about the book I appreciated too. However, it requires far more suspension of disbelief than I was prepared to go in with. (Maybe if it had started a little farther in the future. Maybe if it had been a different comet. Maybe if I could have seen Petra's inability to fall directly to sleep as anything but a information conveying plot device badly executed. Maybe.) It felt like every chapter I was asked to swallow something else that just didn't feel plausible but was being forced into what the author needed for her plot. (To be fair, I'm hard to please when it comes to dystopian science-fiction.) Unfortunately, I'm also a character reader, and this book is severely lacking in both characterization and arc development, so mostly I was just bored. So. Bored. So very very bored.