The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer – Michelle Hodkin

Publisher’s 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.”

Note: This was an incredibly hard review to write, but I believe I’ve managed to avoid including spoilers.

My inability to connect with the female protagonists of too many recent YA novels has directly contributed to my ongoing reading slump. Their voices, or lack thereof, do little to compel me to follow them through hundreds of pages, and so, time and again, I set their books aside. The general premise of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer was enough to hook me, and by the time Mara started to grate on my nerves, I was determined to see the thing out.

I liked Mara. At first. Coping with the aftermath of a traumatic event inspired some sympathy in me towards her character. But what went much further towards winning me over? Her back-and-forth banter with her older brother, Daniel, and her obvious fondness for her little brother, Joseph. Make no mistake: Mara is the caustic, take-’em-out-at-the-knees type. And she remained her caustic self (some readers say witty, I say caustic) around Daniel, but in those moments with her brothers, a sweet side came out, betraying a vulnerable aspect of her nature. That, more than anything else, is what I initially responded to. Unfortunately, at some point her decision-making process fell apart. She was no longer the smart, sharp girl she originally seemed to be, and it didn’t ring true, for me at least, that the cause of this degeneration was her mental state. If that had been the case, if I really bought into her unraveling, it would have been one thing. But it got to a point where her character stopped being likable or worthy of sympathy. By novel’s end, all I felt toward her was growing frustration.

It’s stating the obvious, I’m sure, to admit that my favorite characters in the novel were Daniel and Joseph; the same applies to me saying that my favorite interactions involved one or both brothers and Mara. If I’m being particularly honest, Daniel may have been a bit too good to be true, and Joseph perhaps a tad bit too precocious, but that didn’t matter much to me. I’m a sucker for strong family units in fiction, and both of these boys, in their own way, were really there for Mara.

Now. Noah. What to say about Noah? Some wonderfully sexy things came out of his mouth. A girl could fall prey to such talk. I wasn’t entirely immune myself, but at the same time he was no Etienne St. Clair or – and this one might be slightly closer to the mark considering their personalities – Nico Rathburn (in that he didn’t evoke the same kind of Oh God emotion in the pit of my stomach). Noah cultivates a certain reputation for his own reasons, some of which are easily sussed out, but I never quite got a handle on him, or believed his motivation for becoming so inordinately loyal to Mara.

To sum up: I was on a see-saw with the two main characters, one I occasionally wanted to level off, but would have played in the park for days and days with the brothers.

I’ve mentioned before, and forgive me if this is becoming redundant, that I love mystery novels. I have since I was very young and, really, I blame my father: he set my little feet on that path, gave me a nudge, and enabled my need for all things deductive along the way. But what does that have to do with Mara Dyer? Considering the twisting, spiraling trajectory of the plot: everything. And for once, my must-figure-things-out brain pretty much got the better of me. See, I found myself preempting the twists. The slightest hint of a twist on the horizon and, instead of settling into the story to ride it out, I pulled myself from it to work the possibility of what might occur (or what it might mean) the same way I would a Rubik’s Cube, pushing and prodding and snarling until things lined up just right. And so the ending? That supposed-to-be-shocking, cliffhanger ending? Didn’t shock me in the least. Didn’t leave me wide-eyed and scratching my head while attempting to understand what just happened. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was obvious, but there was a trail of breadcrumbs to follow (and to pick up if, like me, you just can’t stand to see them litter the floor). To be fair, I didn’t figure out everything (though I do have a few suspicions).

If you don’t nurse the same tendency to latch onto mystery threads like the proverbial dog with a bone, that last paragraph (and this one too) is irrelevant. I felt the need to include it because being only semi-present (or semi-immersed) for at least the last quarter of the novel affected my reading experience as a whole. Why? Because the secondary result of working the mystery angle so hard was the dulling of the creepier aspects of the story. And, honestly, that was a shame. Every now and again I like a good shivery moment while reading.

If I haven’t gone on enough about it already, there was one thing about the novel that, like my father, enabled my pulling apart of the threads: the pace. It was…leisurely. Not slow, necessarily, but the story took its time unfolding, lingering when the mood struck, more so in the beginning as Mara acclimated to her new school, to Noah’s baffling attention, and to dealing with the discomfort prompted by her mother’s continued perception of her mental and emotional state. If pacing is an issue for you – meaning you prefer fast-paced, action-imbued stories – you may want to take this book’s slow and steady roll into consideration beforehand.

As it turns out, this is one case in which I cannot definitively say that I did or did not like the book. I read it – and, despite how it may seem based on the tone of this review, doing so wasn’t a hardship. Finishing it in a single day is evidence of that. And I’ll likely read the next book. After all, I have to see how some of my suspicions pan out. So. Well. There you have it.

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