Saturday 15 June 2013

Book Review (229): Wildlife - Fiona Wood


Wildlife

Publication: 1st June 2013
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Pages: 384
Genre: Contemporary
Age Appropriate: Young Adult
Life? It’s simple: be true to yourself.
The tricky part is finding out exactly who you are…

In the holidays before the dreaded term at Crowthorne Grammar’s outdoor education camp two things out of the ordinary happened.
A picture of me was plastered all over a twenty-metre billboard.
And I kissed Ben Capaldi.
 


Boarding for a term in the wilderness, sixteen-year-old Sibylla expects the gruesome outdoor education program – but friendship complications, and love that goes wrong? They’re extra-curricula.

Enter Lou from Six Impossible Things – the reluctant new girl for this term in the great outdoors. Fragile behind an implacable mask, she is grieving a death that occurred almost a year ago. Despite herself, Lou becomes intrigued by the unfolding drama between her housemates Sibylla and Holly, and has to decide whether to end her self-imposed detachment and join the fray. 

And as Sibylla confronts a tangle of betrayal, she needs to renegotiate everything she thought she knew about surviving in the wild.

A story about first love, friendship and NOT fitting in.

Read an extract here: http://www.panmacmillan.com.au/resources/FW-Wildlife.pdf
My Thoughts.
I really wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I actually did, I've recently got into Contemporary fiction and have read some fantastic books but unfortunately this one fell short for me.
The main reason that I wasn't such a big fan was the characters, I couldn't connect with any of them and that's probably because there wasn't any characters that I liked, some I disliked much more than others, and I ended up more frustrated with them the further on I got into the book.
The character of Lou I may have possibly liked if she hadn't appeared in a previous book 'Six Impossible Things' that I've never read and it left me feeling like I'd missed out on a whole lot of back story that's important to the character development from that book to this one, the death of her boyfriend in the first book impacted her life but I couldn't sympathise with her being as I felt left out of the loop as it were.
I also couldn't understand why a lot of the characters did the things that they did.
Being a book written by an Australian author I did appreciate the Aussie slang scattered throughout but wasn't particularly interested in the camp or the amount of hiking that these students were expected to partake in.
This book has a very high rating of 4.50 on Goodreads so I'm thinking that it's just not my cup of tea, but I suggest this book to other people whom are into the Contemporary genre, you might just enjoy it a lot more than myself.
Be sure to check out the book extract at the bottom of the synopsis and decide for yourselves.
I give this 3/5 Stars.

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