Review: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, by Michelle Hodkin. The GoodReads summary:

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.

So after taking a full 24 hours to gather my thoughts on this book, I finally feel like I might possibly be ready to write a review. When I initially finished the book, my thoughts and feeling were ALL over the place--so much so that I honestly couldn’t decide whether I liked the book or not. It’s hard to decide if you love something when it messes with your mind so totally. But I think I’ve decided, that yes, I did like this book.

Character-wise, I didn’t ever really feel like I connected with Mara. It wasn’t that she was unlikable--it’s just that such crazy things are going on that I couldn’t relate to her at all. I kept wondering what she was like before the accident, and I have that feeling that I probably would’ve liked THAT Mara. The non-crazy one.

Noah has an English accent, which was kind of all I needed to like him. But through most of the book, I couldn’t figure out why he was so single-minded in his pursuit of Mara, when A) she’s CRAZY, and B) she kept pushing him away.The reason he’s so into her is eventually explained, but not until the very end.

This book did a fantastic job at the whole psychological thriller thing. There were so many times when I couldn’t tell what was real and what was in Mara’s head. I really couldn’t put this book down, and that was mostly because it simultaneously intrigued me and gave me the heebie-jeebies. I couldn’t stop reading until I found out how it all went down.

I feel like almost every review I’ve read for this book mentions a certain scene with the swamp and the alligators and how it really threw them off. I agree that the scene is confusing at first, but it does get explained later, so I’m not really sure what all those people were talking about. Based on those other reviews, I was expecting something much weirder in that scene, so I was pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. Well, maybe enjoyed isn’t the right word--it was so intense and weird and confusing that “enjoyed” just doesn’t seem like the right sentiment. So maybe I’ll just say that this book was completely gripping, and I’m glad I read it. I’ll definitely be reading the next book.