Review: The Great Unexpected

The Great Unexpected by Sharon Creech

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Some of Sharon Creech's books are among my favorites, especially Walk Two Moons, but this one won't be.

The thing that most puzzles me about why this book didn't grab me is that one of the difficulties I had with the book was that I couldn't keep Lizzie and Naomi straight in my mind. This should NOT have been a problem, since Lizzie was the talker and Naomi was the dreamer. I think part of the problem is that Lizzie, the talker, wasn't the narrator of the book. So you end up with Naomi, the dreamer, doing most of the talking.

The other problem is that I just didn't care enough about some of the peripheral characters. Nula and Joe you got to know a bit, but some of the others seemed to be there just to justify and then later tie up the loose ends of a rather complex interweaving of plot elements. And, even after all of that, those plot elements still had to be tied up yet again in the last couple of chapters of the book.

Finally, there is the implausibility of the resolution. I won't say too much of it, but it just didn't seem real to me. And even the resolution leaves lots of questions dangling - and these are not the cliffhangers of some novels, urging you to buy the next book in the series, but they are, rather, little niggling things that early on in the novel seemed to point toward some question that needed answering, but then the answer, if it does appear, seems incomplete and unsatisfactory.

I did read the whole book, but I don't think it will be one I tout to kids as a "must read".



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