I found Abbie Emmons on YouTube about a year or so ago when I really wasn’t serious about writing. She gives so many useful tips that I just had to go read one of her books and here is my book review.
This is a classic love story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Things happen to keep them apart but in the end… ? Well, you know?
So the protagonist is a girl names Orca. Yes, like the whale. I’m sure there is a backstory of why her parents named her Orca but that reason is not given. It is up to you as the reader to create that story in your mind.
I do want to talk about his cover art for the audio version of the story. I did listen to it instead of reading it myself. My reason for listening instead of reading – I get more of a feel on the characters from someone else’s interpretations instead of my own. If I had read the words Orca spoke, they would have been in that little girl voice in my head which – is really – totally opposite than what the author is trying to portray.
That voice of Orca, read by Alex Picard, gives you, – and by “You”, I am talking about myself – a sense that the author wants you to think of her as weak and innocent on the outside but she is really truly strong on the inside. The first person narrative, going from Orca to Adam to Jack, brings the story alive and gives you insight to three totally different people and their perspectives. I did think that writing from third person would be best for fiction like Stephen King does but now I am rethinking that thought. First person would be best.
Although this is a love story, it is also a journey. It takes you on a journey of “first.” It takes you on a journey of relationships and how they grow. It takes you on a journey of heartbreak. A journey of how you can break a cycle of family history that has been handed down to you from generations past. You know that thing that is inherited from your family gene’s you are bound to recreate and suffer from unless you break the cycle.
I would suggest listening over reading. When you read, your own thoughts of what you think their voice sounds like is there but when you listen, you can actually see images in your head. You can see their actions playing out like a movie. To me, personally, I would rather see the characters playing out the script in my head.
This book is full of plot twist and turns. It is definitely a page turner. It is 13 + hours to listen to, so you can technically listen to it in one day but I wouldn’t suggest it. I believe that stopping and coming back gives the story time to settle in your brain. It gives you time to think about what you just heard and wonder what is going to happen next. Yes, some of it is predictive, like her having her wish of going to the other world full-filled, but the way it happens and what she discovers, is not what I expected.
Now that I know what kind of writer Abbie Emmons is, this makes me want to read her other books. I want to write like her too. She brings her characters alive. She makes you wonder what happened to them. Is she going to write a follow up book called “The Other World: Part 2”? (I hope so.) She makes you care about her characters. They are so believable and could be real people. In the Abbie Universe, they are real. So Abbie, if you just happen to read this, please write a follow up book. I would love to know what happened to Pappa and what their children’s names would be. Would they also be named after sea creatures?
Married in Arkansas 