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A review by aaron_griffiths
Beck by Mal Peet
3.0
I read this book as part of the CLIP Carnegie book club at work, and was surprised that it was shortlisted for the award. The award itself is based around YA novels, and even though it is targeted at 16+, I felt as if it would be better suited for a slightly older reader who would fit into the New Adult category.
This book needs to come with a trigger warning for the first part, due to the content. Within the first 60 pages, the reader discovers that the protagonist "Beck" is orphaned at a young age and sent to Canada where he lives among the Catholic Brothers. This is the point the trigger warning comes into play. While there, he is abused both physically and sexually by the Brothers. Even though this fact is only lightly brushed upon, it still came as a bit of a shock to me whilst reading and it is a fact that played on my mind whilst reading the rest of the novel.
Whilst reading, I found that the story seemed extremely repetitive and not really progressing in any way. The whole novel was made up of Beck constantly travelling from one place to another, staying for a while and then moving on again. Once I had read the second part of the novel and moved onto he third, I felt as if everything I was reading I had previously read in the book, even though the location was different with slightly different events happening to Beck himself. The ending I felt was a slight let down as I felt the relationship that was created between Beck and Grace (an older women, who is also a mixed race white - Native American), could have been developed further to give the reader more satisfaction about the events of the whole novel. These were the reasons why I only gave it 3 stars.
Meg Rosoff completed this book for Peet after his death, which was carried out seamlessly. While reading, I did not find myself noticing and changes in the tone or storyline, which would have caused me as a reader to notice the two different authors contribution to the novel.
Ultimately, I wanted more from this novel that what I actually got from reading this. I found myself loosing my way when reading and I feel that if there was slightly more structure to the novel as a whole I wouldn't have had this trouble and would have enjoyed it more than I actually did.
This book needs to come with a trigger warning for the first part, due to the content. Within the first 60 pages, the reader discovers that the protagonist "Beck" is orphaned at a young age and sent to Canada where he lives among the Catholic Brothers. This is the point the trigger warning comes into play. While there, he is abused both physically and sexually by the Brothers. Even though this fact is only lightly brushed upon, it still came as a bit of a shock to me whilst reading and it is a fact that played on my mind whilst reading the rest of the novel.
Whilst reading, I found that the story seemed extremely repetitive and not really progressing in any way. The whole novel was made up of Beck constantly travelling from one place to another, staying for a while and then moving on again. Once I had read the second part of the novel and moved onto he third, I felt as if everything I was reading I had previously read in the book, even though the location was different with slightly different events happening to Beck himself. The ending I felt was a slight let down as I felt the relationship that was created between Beck and Grace (an older women, who is also a mixed race white - Native American), could have been developed further to give the reader more satisfaction about the events of the whole novel. These were the reasons why I only gave it 3 stars.
Meg Rosoff completed this book for Peet after his death, which was carried out seamlessly. While reading, I did not find myself noticing and changes in the tone or storyline, which would have caused me as a reader to notice the two different authors contribution to the novel.
Ultimately, I wanted more from this novel that what I actually got from reading this. I found myself loosing my way when reading and I feel that if there was slightly more structure to the novel as a whole I wouldn't have had this trouble and would have enjoyed it more than I actually did.