Alex McAulay

I received this book as part of the Other Shelf Tours, and I requested it on pure cover appeal alone -- and since we all know how this typically works out for me, I'll just hold out my hand to be slapped now.

I don't know why I don't learn. I sort of don't know what to say about this book. It's not that the writing was awful, per se, it's just that I was completely indifferent for a majority of the book. This is a suspense novel, and it should have been riveting. These kids are stranded in a brutal environment with an apparent truckload of maniacs on the loose, and horrible, absolutely horrible, things are happening to them -- and I didn't care. McAuly never made me feel like Courtney or her friends were real, and even though they were in near-constant danger, I never felt as though they were -- I never had that tension that you should have with this type of book, the tension where you jerk upright and hunch over the book, or literally sit on the edge of your seat in some weird mimicry of the events, as if you may get up and run or fight or whatever the case may be. Courtney's narration was sort of apathetic and disjointed, which is maybe a realistic shock reaction, but which doesn't lend itself to the excitement of a suspense story -- and this feeling carried over even into the parts where Courtney claimed to be terrified. I found myself apathetic in the same way, at one point calmly thinking, "Yeah, ___________'s going to die," and moving on like it was nothing. I should care is a main character is about to bite it. I have to put this on McAuly -- you can't just say there's terror, you have to prove it. Make me terrified, make me give a damn. If brutal, horrific things are happening and I feel nothing more than mild disgust, that's an issue.

There did come a point near the end of the book where I started to feel a little more tension -- when Courtney is finally faced with the decision to confront the situation and be active on her own -- and from then on it was more enjoyable -- but in a 300 page book, to become invested in the last 50 pages is unacceptable. That's 250 pages of wasted potential. And even though I felt the tension then, it was too little, too late. But that point it was too close to the end for me to care who made it out alive, if anyone. I was over it. That budding tension should have happened in the beginning and been built upon throughout, so that by the end I was ravenous to know what happened. That's what a thriller should be. If this hadn't been a book specifically for review, I wouldn't have made it past 50 pages. I don't even know that I would have made it to 50 pages. If I don't care enough about the characters by then to worry when they're in imminent danger, then it's too late to make me care.… (más)

Shelter Me was, quite possibly, one of the WORST YA novels I have ever read. The premise of this book had you thinking this was going to be a gripping historical WWII novel told through the eyes of a young protagonist. The synopsis was the best part of the story and was the most misleading to the reader.

The writing was poorly done, neither the characters nor the dialog fit into the period of WWII. The characters in Shelter Me would have fit better in a reality show on MTV. More troubling was the plot surrounding Maggie-- I understand that in order for a character to experience peril there must be conflict and intense drama but what I found disturbing was that the peril and every circumstance the characters faced had a creepy sexual undertone.… (más)

I had such high hopes for this book. I read the blurb online and immediately had to have it so it actually saddened me when I didn’t like it. Like, at all.

Could my expectations being so high have influenced that? No question. But regardless of that the reality of the matter is the book fell short for a variety of reasons outside of that.

The first being that the story was fairly predictable. I can think of only one element (and giving the author his due it was a very big element) that actually caught me off guard. For the most part, however, I knew what was going to happen before it did. I wasn’t even surprised when the end turned out exactly as I anticipated it would from around the second chapter in.

Another aspect that didn’t work for me were the characterizations. Outside of the fact that we never really delved deep enough into any of the characters to begin with, the readers were faced with a series of cliched characters that didn’t have any overwhelmingly unique qualities from any other story of this nature. Those who were disguised as good but were really bad were not disguised well enough. I figured them out pretty much from the chapter each was introduced in.

Lastly, for such a short book there was so very much happening. The reader zoomed from one plot element to another (none of which I want to give away in case you want to read it and maybe be surprised) in a matter of a chapter or two. In the end, the book did portray the elements outlined in the blurb, but again, my expectations were that it would have focused more on Maggie’s journey on a more personal level than the superficial way it did. So perhaps it wasn’t the book as much as it was me.… (más)