READING: The Unbecoming Of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

The Unbecoming Of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

Publication date: September 27th, 2011
Published by: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
Genre: YA Paranormal
Rating: 3,5/5
Eligible for Debut Author Challenge 2011

Mara Dyer doesn't think life can get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there.

It can.

She believes there must be more to the accident she can't remember that killed her friends and left her mysteriously unharmed.

There is.

She doesn't believe that after everything she's been through, she can fall in love.

She's wrong.

300 pages in The Unbecoming Of Mara Dyer I thought that this will be one of my 2011 favourites. When I turned the last page I thought yeah, it was OK. 2 days later,when I had more time to mull it over (never good!) I came to the dreaded conclusion that it wasn't so good, after all. However, I've decided to trust my instinct and not allow the book to suffer because of my indecisiveness, hence the 3,5 starts. Leniency aside though, this book had some serious flaws.

OK let's start with the good parts.  Mara Dyer (sorry for not using the whole title) was a dizzyingly fast-paced book and that's a quality I personally love in a book. Who wants to feel bored, right? Also, what helped the pace was the way the book is divided, into small but many chapters, the clever, funny and short-sentenced dialogues which I full-heartedly enjoyed, but mostly the suspense and tension of the plot. It was all so unbelievably mysterious and puzzling, I was on the verge of skimming it just to find out what happens in the end, something I NEVER normally do. So naturally when the anticipation to find out what's going on is killing you and you reach the end and you go "That's it??", that's when you realise that something went seriously wrong. 
In my opinion, the ending doesn't do the rest of the book justice. It was rushed, very vague and just didn't cut it for me. Also, I thought that Mara Dyer is a contemporary book, well OK with a splash of paranormal. A splash, though, not whole buckets of! Yes, the last pages were intense and cliff-hangery but by then I had lost interest, to be honest.And there was also an incident with some gators…Yes. The whole gator thing didn't work out all that well. Or at all. If it was all a hallucination as Mara originally thought it would be much better.  
Which brings us to the characters. Mara and Noah. Other people don't matter that much. Well, except for Mara's brother Daniel who had more book-time than the others. Mara was OK. It was kinda difficult to dislike her (not that you would want to) because of what she went through in the past and is going through in the present thinking she's seeing things and that she's crazy. Also, she doesn't do anything that's so bad you wanna slap her or have any violent tendencies toward her :) Well, there's the Noah thing. Let's see: he's gorgeous, has a british accent and is smug and arrogant. That's all good right up till a)he reminded me of Patch in Hush,Hush and that admittedly creeped me out and b)Mara's friend Jamie kept telling her that Noah was a jerk to his sister when they were dating just to piss Jamie off and if that wasn't enough he told her that he's the kind of guy that uses girls like condoms: uses them and then throws them away. Not a pretty picture, let me tell you. After Mara semi-confronted him about it, he was so nonchalant about it and practically confirmed it, that I wanted to punch him hard! So yeah, Noah is not the kind of guy that floats my boat, sorry.
Will I pick up the next book? Sure, why not? Will I have any expectations? None whatsoever. Even though I have red FAR worse books than Mara, it's kinda overrated in my opinion. And that's not the book's fault nor Hodkins's.  Those who work the hype-machine should stop and give it a rest already. They're doing more harm than good.Pick up Mara but don't expect wonders.

(Sorry about the alignment of the text. Blogger is acting up again-must be Thursday!)