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A review by bookwormjimmy
The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni
2.0
I really wanted to like this, but there was just so much that was not happening for me. I picked this up as a freebie on California Bookstore Day among a shelf of a whole bunch of self-help and self-esteem books. This was one of the few that seemed interesting. After all, it references Spiderman's first love interest, Gwen Stacy. What could go wrong?
Don't get me wrong…this isn't an awful book. It has its own merits. I did like some of the parallels to the Spiderman comics that Sarah Bruni incorporated into the text. It was a nice touch. But there were a lot of points that I felt were really forced. Particularly at the end when Gwen somehow falls into the lake by a man in green pants…aka the Green Goblin. It's a plot development like this that make it seem like she didn't know where she was going with the story. At the very least, this could have been built up a little farther back in the plot, instead of this person's sudden appearance.
I can't really say I was a fan of the constant use of flashbacks. It really disrupted the flow of the story. As I was reading hoping for the story to go along, the characters would constantly flash back to a point in their lives. Once is okay. A few times. But this happened every single time. And more often than not, they didn't have much of a parallel with what was happening in the present, at least thematically. They were simply expository elements that told their back story. Again, no depth.
The characters choices often didn't make sense. And even more upsetting, I really didn't understand the point of the kidnapping even after I finished the book. Was it just so the brothers could get back together? What with Peter's "spidey-sense" I thought there were be a little more mythology going on. But again, it was just a simple plot device to get the story moving…nothing more than that.
I felt that this could have been a lot better in so many ways. At the very least, I now know the controversy pertaining around the night Gwen Stacy died.
Don't get me wrong…this isn't an awful book. It has its own merits. I did like some of the parallels to the Spiderman comics that Sarah Bruni incorporated into the text. It was a nice touch. But there were a lot of points that I felt were really forced. Particularly at the end when Gwen somehow falls into the lake by a man in green pants…aka the Green Goblin. It's a plot development like this that make it seem like she didn't know where she was going with the story. At the very least, this could have been built up a little farther back in the plot, instead of this person's sudden appearance.
I can't really say I was a fan of the constant use of flashbacks. It really disrupted the flow of the story. As I was reading hoping for the story to go along, the characters would constantly flash back to a point in their lives. Once is okay. A few times. But this happened every single time. And more often than not, they didn't have much of a parallel with what was happening in the present, at least thematically. They were simply expository elements that told their back story. Again, no depth.
The characters choices often didn't make sense. And even more upsetting, I really didn't understand the point of the kidnapping even after I finished the book. Was it just so the brothers could get back together? What with Peter's "spidey-sense" I thought there were be a little more mythology going on. But again, it was just a simple plot device to get the story moving…nothing more than that.
I felt that this could have been a lot better in so many ways. At the very least, I now know the controversy pertaining around the night Gwen Stacy died.