Ad: Angel Rock Leap by Ellen Weisberg
Targeted: No
At this point I'm pretty sure that the advertisements at the top of my YouTube feed are random but today it suggested a book to me. As we all know by now, I love to read - my very first TIMMTI post was for a reading challenge - but despite that fact, I'm pretty sure this is coincidental. The book in question is a YA novel called 'Angel Rock Leap' by Ellen Weisberg.
The ad itself was a video filled with reviews, set to a cover of 'Shake It Out' by Florence + the Machine. I didn't watch it for long before heading to Goodreads, where the book has a 4.12/5 rating. That, however, is not enough to convince me to read this book. Between the title and the artwork I get a feeling that this book is not a standard YA novel but a Christian one, and after reading through the reviews on Goodreads my suspicions were confirmed.
The book doesn't sound bad - it's apparently about taking ownership of your situation after your life plans change (the main character, Sarah, fails college and goes back home to confront her past, or something) - but I'm not up for being preached to. I thought, if this book is free on the Apple Store, I'll read it. It turns out that it's £7.49, a price I rarely pay for new physical books, never mind virtual books that I can't display on my shelf. What Apple does have, though, is a free sample chapter. So I read that.
The writing is alright, but a couple of things put me off reading the whole book. Firstly, the professor who just failed our protagonist is called Dr. Weinstein and even though this character isn't one I'm supposed to feel kindly towards, I struggled to get past that name. Next, everything in this chapter was negative - I haven't retained any description about Sarah except that she was upset, and I think she loved writing but for some reason was doing a medical research degree? Finally, a lot of the chapter was taken up with a description of some greasy old man cowboy who starts talking to her at the train station and then follows her before letting her go when she gets off at her stop. Between that and the name Weinstein, I felt uncomfortable, but honestly confused. If this is what the story is about, the author hasn't done a great job setting us up - we're straight in the action. If this is a prologue to the action, I don't feel like she really helped me get to know the character that I'm supposed to be sympathetic for.
I'm not going to find out what happens in the rest of this book as I won't be purchasing it. I'll stick to secular YA.
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