Review: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

Synopsis: Mara Dyer doesn’t think life can get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there.

It can.

She believes there must be more to the accident she can’t remember that killed her friends and left her mysteriously unharmed.

There is.

She doesn’t believe that after everything she’s been through, she can fall in love.

She’s wrong.

Publisher: Simon and Shuster Children's Publishing

Edition: Hardcover

Page Count: 452 pages

Rating: 4/5 stars

Review:

This book is about a girl named Mara Dyer who experiences a tragedy. Her family leaves their hometown and moves to Florida. Mara starts to experience strange things while in this town. While all this is happening, she meets a boy named Noah Shaw.

I liked this book. It was fast paced, full of mystery, and had a good amount of romance in it.* I liked how Mara at least tried to stand up for herself in this story. She didn't completely fall for Noah Shaw, the love interest, straight away. But I still thought it was too fast to be real. There was a supernatural twist to this book which was okay. I thought too much was happening and I got confused. The beginning and the end were good and I liked it. The middle focused too much on the romance and it turned into a typical paranormal romance.

I also didn't like how we never knew if Mara was telling the truth or not. I'm not saying that she was lying, not at all. Since she has "hallucinations", it's hard to tell when something is real and when it's not real. There would be parts where I would think that there was no way that this could be real, it had to be a hallucination. But then it turned out to be real and I didn't know what to think. There were parts where it was hard to understand what was going on completely. Some readers might get it but others might not.

This plot was very unique. I have never read anything quite like it. I'm curious to see where this might go in the future.

The characters in this book were real to me. But there were times where some of their actions were too unbelievable. Mara was a decent character. She declined toward the end, though. She started to get weird. "The only way I can protect them is if I leave." blah blah blah. Mara did get very selfish in the end. She thought about herself more than her family. She made it seem like she was caring but she wasn't. She put her family and Noah through crap and leaving is not the right decision. (Not a spoiler).

Let's get onto the love interest, Noah. I actually really liked him. There were times where I thought he was too arrogant but then he'd get really sweet. But really, the whole "Shaw's exhausted the whole female population of this school" thing got very annoying. It was so cliche. I loved the banter between Mara and Noah. It was so cute and funny.

If you are looking for a unique plot and a nice romance, go pick this book up if you want to. This is a lot like a typical paranormal romance** and if you don't like that, don't pick this up.

*I might be a bit biased because I love me some romance.
**By paranormal romance, I don't mean that as a spoiler. When you read the book you understand.