Release Date: September 27th, 2011
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
"Mara Dyer believes life can't 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 strangely unharmed. There is. She doesn't believe that after everything she's been through, she can fall in love. She's wrong."
So you know when you are super excited to receive a much requested book for a book tour but then when the book comes "life all of a sudden happens" and you don't get a chance to finish the book before you must pass the book on? Unfortunately, "Mara Dyer" was the victim of this in my reading life.
I was SO excited to be one of the few to be approved for this book on tour in the middle of July/beginning of August. But when I received the book at the end of the August it was the week before school started and "life just happened." I started the book but no matter what I tried to do in order to make time for it, I just didn't get it finished before I had to send the book on. So no, this is not technically a review. But even though I only read the first couple of chapters, I do have something to say about this book.
As a teacher it seems I'm always talking about the "hook" of a book and its importance. This past week was the first official week of "Recreational Reading" in my classroom (with both seniors and sophomores)^. All of my classes took to it very well and came into my classroom ready to read. But I did have one student who said that she had started the book a few nights ago but "just wasn't liking it." I asked her what page she was on — 97. At that point, I told her to put the book down and go find something she did like (after giving her quite a few recommendations). If a book hasn't "hooked" my students (especially struggling readers) after fifty pages, and even that is stretching it, I just don't think they should waste their time reading it.
Now it's different for readers (like most of us) who either refuse to put a book down or give the book a hundred or 150 pages. But for students who I have to "persuade" to read, I don't want them wasting their time and learning to dislike reading even more because they just can't get into the book. Note to all authors: if your book doesn't grab my attention in (at the most) fifty pages, I won't be recommending it to struggling students — no matter how much I enjoy the book as a whole.
Even though I didn't get the chance to finish "Mara Dyer," this will be a book I can pitch to students. While I only read the first couple chapters, they are chapters that I think about even now (nearly a month later) because the hook was so effective. When a struggling reader comes into my classroom on Friday and says "I don't want to read. All books are dumb" (it's happened before), "Mara Dyer" is a book I can give that student and say, "Give me fifteen pages and if you don't like it you don't have to read today," knowing that without a doubt that student will read the entire hour and then ask me if they can check it out for the weekend.
Books like "Mara Dyer" are a teacher's treasure and treasures like this are few and far between. Do you know of any other treasures that I can recommend to struggling readers with brilliant hooks?
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To the FTC, with love: ARC from Tour