Thursday, August 25, 2016

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

A special thank you to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

As someone that is interested in visual arts, the description of the book sounded interesting, but there was a lot of animation terminology and references that were lost on me.  The art could've become a more central part of the story, become more like a character, but Whitaker compartmentalizes the art to the earlier chapters and takes the plot elsewhere for the bulk of the story.    

There were some interesting plot twists that ultimately kept me reading but unfortunately I started to skim probably around the half way mark.  I felt that these twists were a tactic, like click bait, employed by the author to keep the reader's interest.  

Character-wise, there was a lot going on and Mel became a caricature of herself.  Whitaker tried to tackle too many things in one novel, which didn't work, especially when using first-person point of view.  The book could've benefited from a solid substantive edit.

What I did like was the beginning—the brief backstory of how Sharon and Mel met and their time at school—and wished that the author developed this part because for me this was the grit of the story.  I'm actually surprised that this was not a prologue since this part of the story was not going to be fleshed out.

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