Claire Zorn

Trigger warnings: Death of a mother, grief and loss depiction

6/10, now that I look back I enjoyed this one at first however I lost that feeling over time and in the end I felt that it wasn't worth reading and even now I highly doubt that I would do that due to the glaring flaws in this, where do I even begin. It starts immediately with a rather traumatic scene as only a few pages in the mother of the main character Sam dies and he spends the first part of the book grieving for her and I almost didn't realise that this was set in the 1990s other than the date at the start and the slang and culture of the time like surfing and the Nintendo 64. He tries to pass the time by doing what he does best: surfing and it was established from the beginning that he is rather good at it, sometimes he surfs alone and other times with another person but even that I've seen before in other books I've read before this. Eventually he goes off to his aunt's house with his cousins and I'm not sure why his mother cut herself off from Sam's aunt, I don't really know since it wasn't explained but anyways after that the book just dragged its plot and petered out in the end.… (mehr)

This book was good, really good to be honest. But (yes there is a but) it annoyed me. Really annoyed me. Really really annoyed me ... I could go on.

I was swept along from the beginning being drawn into Fin & Maximums world. I wanted to know what would happen, I agreed with their decisions and wondered how they would cope with what I predicted (correctly) would happen. I cared about the characters, sympathized with Noll's moral questioning and Fin's worries about spoiler the gun, his dad, his mum lack of food. I was impressed with the way the characters were represented, average 17 year olds being generally badly stereotyped (by average I mean one who would find our world normal rather than say Katniss who has grown up with The Hunger Games, she is not a typical 17 year old).

What really annoyed me was the end. It ended abruptly, too abruptly for me. I felt as if there were space for at least another 100 pages of story. I was disappointed I didn't get an overall resolution to the story. So it gets a 3.5 stars from me. The Sky so Heavy was great but it could have been soo much better.… (mehr)

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read and review this lovely and insightful work by Claire Zorn. "The Protected" examines and seeks to work apart the effect the loss of a family member has on those who are left behind. We are introduced to Hannah and her parents nearly a year after her sister Kate was killed in an accident, where the family has been reduced to shattered crumbs. And the narrative style choice is interesting. It's very fragmented, which fits well with the mental state of all those involved. Sometimes the narrative seems to slow a bit, as we don't get to the truly meaningful questions of what happened to Hannah and what happened the day of the accident until late in the book, but the questions asked and their answers are very effective. It is a painful situation, and that is handled very appropriately. I loved the secondary characters, and the relationshps that formed with the protagonist.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the author.… (mehr)