Alone | Robert J.Crane | Review
Since getting my Kindle a few months ago, I've downloaded a good dozen or so free books. Free books are the best. However, sometimes free books are a bit of a hit and miss. And Alone, by Robert J. Crane, has me confused as to whether or not it was one of those hit and misses. You'll see what I mean...
We first meet 17 year old Sienna Nealon, the main character, in her house, slightly freaking out because her mother has vanished and her home is being broken into by ruffians. In the first chapter, we learn that Sienna is no ordinary girl - she has lived alone with her mother in their small house all her life, never leaving it, never having contact with the outside world, trying to follow all the rules that her mother had drilled into her head for so long. Basically, Sienna is a prisoner in her own house. Escaping the house, Sienna is on the run. As the story goes on, she discovers that the ridiculously huge man pursuing her is named Wolfe, that there's a agency called the Directorate who want her to join them, that her mother wasn't the person Sienna thought she was, and Sienna knows very little about everything, including herself.
I was really drawn into it just by the first page, but then I found myself drifting into the 'meh' and the 'whatever' zones, for some reason. I can't really put my finger on it, but there was something about it that suddenly changed and I didn't like it as much as the first chapter or so. Nevertheless, it was a nice short read that had some good parts in it, and some fun characters. Sienna herself is an interesting character, and although we're probably supposed to cheer for her and want her to do well etc, I found myself almost shocked at some of the things she said and the character in her that emerged more and more as the story went on. Perhaps it was because I didn't really know what I was expecting in the story (or from the characters), that I found it difficult to keep reading at points, and I found it hard not be annoyed by Sienna and her actions.
It's written in first person, which was actually perfect for the story, I think, as there were things we didn't realise/didn't find out about until deep into the book, simply because Sienna hadn't revealed it to us, or to any of the other characters. So that put an interesting spin on things. Overall, I think I would give it a two and a half stars (couldn't figure out how to take half a star off up there). I liked the original idea (or rather, what I thought it was going to be about - I think I expected something like that movie Hanna, but it ended up sort of like X-Men or something similar, which was fine, but not what I was thinking), but then it got a little bit 'samey' near the end. 'Samey' as in the same, or similar, to a lot of other ideas out there. I might, however, read the next one and see where it goes. But it won't moving up to the top of my 'to-read' list.
Image from Goodreads
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