The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin

Synopsis (from goodreads.com):

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.

Jillian’s Review:

I was really excited about this book when, by the first page, I was hooked. The first chapter got me even more excited and then it plummeted to the ground. Mara, who I thought would be an enjoyable character, turns out to be a foul-mouthed, annoying psycho. She’s supposedly an artist, but doesn’t think like one (meaning, she doesn’t notice colors, or shading, or the shapes of anything). She sees ghosts and hears things but doesn’t really do anything about it. [Spoiler alert] She thinks she’s able to kill things with her mind, but by the end of the book I’m still not sure if that’s what’s really happening.

This had a great plot and I assume it is well written—the story is so enthralling that I didn’t notice if the writing was good or bad, which is a really good thing. This could have easily been at least a four star book had Mara not been cussing up a storm the entire time.

And then there's the guy. Ick. First off, he doesn’t sound hygienically pleasing—wearing nasty, ratty clothes and smoking half the time, not to mention his “history” with all the girls in the school. Gross. And his mouth is just a foul as Mara’s. I couldn’t believe how many times they dropped the F-bomb in this! But the worst were the sexual innuendos. Really? Did you really have to put all that trash in what could have been a really great read?

And last, but not least, the ending was horrible. It didn’t end. There was no resolution, [spoiler alert] just Mara screaming her head off in a police station. Such a disappointment.

Despite the gorgeous cover (which actually never happens in the book—so annoying!), I have to give this one 2 ½ stars. And those stars are for the great story, if Hodkin had just kept out the filth. No teenager (nobody for that matter) needs to sift through all that garbage to get to the good stuff.