Confession: I Do Judge Books By Their Covers

I love wandering around the young adult fiction part of the library. I will pull books off the shelf at random, look at the cover, and if I like it, add it to my pile of books to check out. If the cover makes me mildly interested, then I'll read the synopsis, and then decide whether to read it. If the cover looks completely dull, then back on the shelf it goes. Using that system, I chose to read this book:

I started reading the book, and I didn't quite know what to make of it.

I would get to parts where I felt like I needed a lot more information to figure out the story and then the author just didn't give it to me. And then later, much much later, that information that I felt I needed would turn up in an unexpected place and I would have to think back to what I had read previously and piece together everything in my mind until it made some sense. It took some effort, and I thought that the author was just making sure her readers were really smart. But then I remembered that this was a young adult book, which means that there shouldn't be that much effort needed to piece together an otherwise simple, yet well written book.

So then I thought that maybe it was a young author and when she was reading back through her drafts she realized that she hadn't provided the reader with everything they needed to know, so she added it in later to help make everything make sense. I was satisfied enough with the book, but thought that there were some things lacking, but by the end I was determined to give this author another chance. When I got to the last page, that was when I saw something that made the entire book make sense:

It is a the final book in a 3 book series and I had read the last book first. No wonder I was so confused! I will now proceed to start at the beginning of the series, even though I know how it all ends! :)