Teenager Leila’s life is full of challenges. From bouncing around the foster care system to living with seasonal affective disorder, she’s never had an easy road. Leila keeps herself busy with her passion for environmental advocacy, monitoring the Urban Ecovists message board and joining a local environmental club with her best friend Sarika. And now that Leila has finally been adopted, she dares to hope her life will improve. But the voices in Leila’s head are growing louder by the day. Ignoring them isn’t working anymore. Something calls out to her from the grove at Fairmount Park.
| Amazon | Waterstones |
The Girl and the Grove
Eric Smith
As a whole I felt that this book was a bit of a disappointment to me. It wasn’t what I expected at all, and although it is readable, I wasn’t enjoying myself while reading.
Starting with some positives though, I loved that this book brought environmental issues and also the issues of adoption to the forefront of the story. Leila learning to love her adopted family, and to realise they were her real family was a great sentiment throughout, even when she struggled. I also enjoyed seeing kids in a book loving the environment, and working to save it.
But, I had fully expected this book to be more fantasy, and the fantasy elements didn’t appear until around 50% in (at least!). And by this point, I think I would have preferred this to have been a contemporary read with the issues it was trying to portray. There’s also very limited exploration of the magic in this book, and so I did feel like you could pull these sections and rewrote the ending a little bit without changing the plot. As a whole, I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as I usually enjoy the fantasy genre, and it’s probably because it’s not a good genre fit.
I also got really un-immersed with the book every time the characters started texting or just talking sometimes. The author had included extremely awkward and cringe-worthy teenager talk which was awful to read. It was made even clearer that the author had clearly never experienced being a teenage girl. This along with the pacing being so slow made it quite difficult for me to care for the storyline.
POSITIVES
+ Environmental issues
+ Adoption and what family means
NEGATIVES
– Less fantasy than expected
– Awkward teenage talk
I received The Girl and the Grove by Eric Smith from the publisher via Netgalley. This is an unbiased and honest review