Hello everyone!
I am back with another review, today it is Emancipated by M.G. Reyes.
The story follows a group of 6 teens, all of whom have been emancipated for various reasons. Some want control of their own lives, others were sort of forced into it by their parents who moved away and wanted them to stay behind, that kind of thing. There's also some underlying mystery with one of the narrators, but I have no clue how that fits with the rest of the story. Because I didn't finish the book, I can't really tell you much else in terms of a synopsis.
A major reason this book just didn't work for me was the narration. Now, I can handle a multiple POV situation, but in the 100 or so pages that I read, we jumped around between seven. SEVEN. It was just too much. By the time you figured out who was telling that part of the story, you were on to the next character. I also found that it didn't add anything particularly insightful to the story. If you're going to make me keep straight seven different narrators, make sure that it's important to the story.
Now, I don't know a lot about emancipation, so I can't really speak to the accuracy of the portrayal, but I will say it did feel like Reyes was reaching a bit to get a cast of 6 emancipated teens. Some of the reasoning seemed a bit, I don't know, weird to me. Like I said, I don't know much about it so maybe these are perfectly valid reasons - I just felt like some of them were a bit extreme and didn't necessarily need to/wouldn't normally end with emancipation.
I know there is supposed to be a scandal or thrilling aspect to this book, and I'm sure it gets there at some point, but in the 100 pages I read, I saw a few glimpses of (presumably) that element and it just didn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps reading the whole book would help one better understand what is going on and how it fits with the rest of the story.
From what I've read by briefly skimming some other reviews (and from the fact that this is the first in a series), it doesn't seem like this story has a clear ending and doesn't really go anywhere, so maybe I dodged a bullet? I don't really know - the pacing was so slow and the plot so non-existent that I barely made it a quarter of the way through.
Overall, part of me thinks that perhaps I'm just outgrowing the irritating high school drama type books, and the other part of me thinks that I just wasn't invested enough in the story to give it enough of a chance, but either way, it just didn't work for me.