Spirit of Summerwood Book Review
I don’t usually post my book reviews this late, but this book seriously put me into the silliest reading slump and I don’t even know why. I’ve been reading and into reading a lot lately, but with this book I just couldn’t really do it. So I did not finish this book. At least not for now. I did skim it towards the end, but I did not fully sit down to read the entire thing.
I’m surprised that I didn’t love this book, because I thought it was going to be a fun and wholesome book about a girl and her horse, the supernatural elements like the ghosts seemed really appealing, and I thought it was cool to be rooted in Indigenous myths as well, but all of these things fell quite flat to me. None of the characters felt like they actually wanted to be in the story, I know that sounds weird, but when your main character seems this passive and she’s supposed to be active, it can have that effect on your story. Aislinn (the main character) feels like she’s just being dragged along where the story wants to take her, rather than her being the one who drives the story. And hey, sometimes a passive character is good, but Aislinn wasn’t supposed to be written like that in this book, and it really shows.
I want to talk about Aislinn as a character, because I understand that she is only 12 and that’s quite young. It wasn’t too long ago since I was 12, and I can say that Aislinn makes a lot of mistakes that remind me of myself at this age, but Aislinn is also supposed to be the main character of a book. A lot of the mistakes that she makes and the things that she does don’t make sense, because they’re not really accidents that just seem to happen to her. She’s reckless and has no regard for the rules that are put in place, and then when she gets punished, suddenly she actually pretends to care about the rules. I don’t feel much sympathy for her because all of these things were well within her control but she chose not to be smart about them. Multiple times. I don’t know if I love when a story’s plot depends on the main character being reckless and making bad decisions.
Discussing the plot is a worthwhile topic too. It’s standard, it’s basic, so many things happen in this book, and it’s like little scenes and little moments that just go at such a fast pace. Important scenes and things will happen within one passing sentence, Aislinn will have a complaint about something, and then she will move onto the next scene and the next thing. It feels so incredibly rushed, and little things and little details about the weather and the environment get just as much screentime and thought as actual important plot developments.
Aiding this, the chapters in this books are extremely short, and done strangely? I understand going for one chapter per scene, but that’s not really what this book does. It sort of just has the chapters jump around whenever they feel like cutting off and then starting again. For example, the 1st scene is Aislinn in the car so that’s where the 1st chapter starts off. But it’s a 2 and 1/2 page chapter and they’re in the car but then they also arrive at camp. I don’t understand why all of that chapter could have just been Aislinn in the car thinking to herself, and then them simply turning off the road and arriving there and then the chapter would cut off. But no, instead it’s a scene in the car, and then a scene getting out of the car and meeting people and THEN the chapter cuts off. There are lots more examples, but I think you can get the idea from just this one.
This book was both somehow everything that I expected, and also not? I’m sure this is the perfect horse girl book, but unfortunately, I am not a horse girl. Let me try to explain, I’m not one for horse girl movies or horse girl books, for that matter. Nothing against horses, or horse girls, but I don’t usually prefer content from this very specific genre because most of them are quite bland to me. So, with this one I was sort of expecting the same thing. I was also aware that there would be some supernatural elements, which I suppose is something unique, but that should have really been the main focus of this story. In my opinion.
Writing is subjective… art is subjective… whether a book is good or bad is also subjective… I subjectively think that this book is just wasted potential. I rarely DNF books, especially when I’m not in a reading slump, but this one was genuinely not captivating enough for me to want to keep reading. Better luck next time, I guess.
