Friday, February 10, 2012

Me on Someone Else's Life

Title: Someone Else's Life
Author: Katie Dale
Release Date: February 14, 2012
Publisher: Doubleday Canada (Random House Canada imprint)

When Rosie's mum dies of Huntington's disease, she's even more uspet by the fact that she has a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease herself. Rosie plans to get tested, but that's when her mum's friend, Sarah, tells her that her mum wasn't really her mum, that she was swapped with a premature baby destined to die. Devastated and confused, Rosie heads to America to find her birth mother, but as she discovers more deeply buried secrets and lies, she's left with an agonizing decision, one that will be the most heart-breaking of all.

Unique and heartfelt, Katie Dale has written an emotional story about a girl who's life falls away from her and her search to find the one she was supposed to live. The plot was interesting, the pacing was good. Fans of emotional books might enjoy this, loyal readers of Jodi Picoult and Lurlene McDaniel. Perhaps even Lisa Schroeder fans.

But those aren't the sort of books I usually read and so I was torn while reading this. I'm not saying I didn't like the book, which I did, or that the writing is bad, which it isn't. I just wasn't what I'd expected.

I wish this book was a little more upbeat, I wish Rosie could've been more decisive at times. Sometimes I wished the book had been shorter, it was more like two books in one.

There's more I could say, about certain characters and plot twists, but that would give away some of the magic of this book, this search for place and family, this discovery of self. Instead, I'll say that this book is a journey, not just Rosie's but lots of peoples', and at the end, this was a book about an 18-year-old girl searching for a family and a place of her own.

(I received an e-galley of this book from Random House Canada through NetGalley.)

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