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A review by graveyardbook
A Little Something Different: Fourteen Viewpoints, One Love Story by Sandy Hall
3.0
This was in one positive word: cute.
But in one negative word: aimless
Well, not at first. Initially, there was the aim to get the main couple together but it was stretched out over so many months that I started losing enthusiasm for awkward Lea and shy Gabe to realize their obvious feelings for each other.
The story is told in 14 simple POV's, all clearly labelled, and mostly with distinct voices so I never got confused about who was talking (although the Starbucks baristas may have melded into 1 human being by the end). It's just that some of the POV's did not matter. In idea, the POV of a squirrel and a bench sounds quirky but in execution, it contributed nothing that we didn't get from the other POV's so it was pretty useless.
The other POV characters were all great surface-level characters, who for some reason obsess over catching glimpses of the main characters' snail-pace love life. If I'm being honest, I only really cared about Gabe's brother Sam by the end of the book because everybody else was so...unmemorably casual i.e. I got bored with them real fast.
That's basically me with this whole book: it started off so cute and fun but the not-so-exciting dilemma was nowhere near being solved halfway through the book and there was no climax in sight near the end either. Plus, I kid you not, 90% of the story is dialogue and tends to repeat events that we already witnessed through another POV, which again I saw no reason for.
Overall, I got bored real fast and had to trudge through to the end, where the story finally fizzled to a close without even a hint of excitement. I didn't quite hate anything but I didn't like much either. I suggest if you want to read this, you read it all in one go. Do not spread it over several weeks or you will most likely forget it in some uninhabited corner.
But in one negative word: aimless
Well, not at first. Initially, there was the aim to get the main couple together but it was stretched out over so many months that I started losing enthusiasm for awkward Lea and shy Gabe to realize their obvious feelings for each other.
The story is told in 14 simple POV's, all clearly labelled, and mostly with distinct voices so I never got confused about who was talking (although the Starbucks baristas may have melded into 1 human being by the end). It's just that some of the POV's did not matter. In idea, the POV of a squirrel and a bench sounds quirky but in execution, it contributed nothing that we didn't get from the other POV's so it was pretty useless.
The other POV characters were all great surface-level characters, who for some reason obsess over catching glimpses of the main characters' snail-pace love life. If I'm being honest, I only really cared about Gabe's brother Sam by the end of the book because everybody else was so...unmemorably casual i.e. I got bored with them real fast.
That's basically me with this whole book: it started off so cute and fun but the not-so-exciting dilemma was nowhere near being solved halfway through the book and there was no climax in sight near the end either. Plus, I kid you not, 90% of the story is dialogue and tends to repeat events that we already witnessed through another POV, which again I saw no reason for.
Overall, I got bored real fast and had to trudge through to the end, where the story finally fizzled to a close without even a hint of excitement. I didn't quite hate anything but I didn't like much either. I suggest if you want to read this, you read it all in one go. Do not spread it over several weeks or you will most likely forget it in some uninhabited corner.