BOOK REVIEW: TELL THE TRUTH SHAME THE DEVIL BY MELINA MARCHETTA

2.5 stars

I am disappointed.

Melina Marchetta is my favourite author, and I will always be excited about anything she comes out with, but I just didn't love this book. Why? Well:

1) It was too long, and the plot was irritating. Most of the story was much of the same: this guy calls Bish, tells him to do something, Bish does it, then the guy calls Bish with another thing to do, ad infinitum. It got really annoying and it made the book drag. Not a good feeling to have when the book you're reading is 400 pages...

2) I didn't connect with any of the characters. I'm not sure what it was, but something was missing from this book; it didn't have that Melina Marchetta spark that makes her books so special. Yeah this book had A LOT of characters, but I don't think that's why I couldn't connect with any of them. Almost all of Melina's books have a lot of characters—some might even say too many—but that never stopped me from feeling for them. Their quality was not sacrificed because of the fact that they were amidst a bunch of other characters. My issue with this book is more so about the quality of the characters rather than their quantity. I just didn't feel like I knew any of them. I'd read these emotional scenes and I would feel...nothing. Intellectually I recognized oh, this is an emotional scene, I should be feeling something but emotionally I was like eh. And it guts me to know that because Melina's emotional scenes always wreck me. I know what she's capable of, and it felt like she didn't quite deliver it in this book. 

That's really all I have to say about this. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. It's been less than a day since I finished it and honestly, there isn't a single scene from it that stands out in my mind. It was just meh. 

Gonna be anxiously waiting for Melina's next books though. However long it takes. (Hopefully not that long though. I need more Melina Marchetta in my life. Desperately.)