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Mini Rant Review: Penelope by Rebecca Harrington

So this post is going to be my first "negative" review, and I say negative in quotes because it is, but it isn't. I read Penelope by Rebecca Harrington, and I can only describe it as a bad movie that you cannot tear your eyes away from. I tried very hard to stay positive while I read it, thinking that it was about to get better with the turn of the next page, but it didn't. Was it easy to read? Absolutely. Did it have a standard rise and fall in plot or action? No. This book had absolutely nothing happening in it. And the characters were so utterly weird that you couldn't like them or even want to read about them. Even the "heroine"/title character wasn't great. She wasn't overly unlikable or an underdog, she was just a plain boring girl from Connecticut.



I'm going to copy paste the description from Goodreads, so you can pre-judge this baby for yourself. Here we go...

"When Penelope O'Shaunessy steps into Harvard Yard for the first time she has lots of advice from her mother. "Don't be too enthusiastic, don't talk to people who seem to be getting annoyed, and for heaven's sake, stop playing Tetris on your phone at parties." Penelope needs this advice. She is the kind of girl who passes through much of her life with coffee spilled on her white shirt, who can't quite tell when people are joking, and who, inevitably, always says the wrong thing. But no amount of coaching will prepare Penelope for the people she meets at school."

Now doesn't that sound somewhat exciting to you? To be able to go inside the first year at Harvard and be able to experience it with a normal everyday girl? It did to me, and I was taken aback when it didn't fulfill my expectations. I fell victim to one of the oldest metaphors out there "don't judge a book by its cover", because I judged a book by this cover and thought it was going to be fantastic! I was so wrong. I think the fact that I'm giving myself such a hard time about it is because I actually sat there and read the whole thing. I honestly couldn't put it down, because I was so hopeful at the thought of something worthwhile happening.

Unfortunately nothing did and I wasted about 3 days of my life reading this thing. *Sigh* I'm sorry Rebecca Harrington, I tried and you just didn't win me over. I hope that your next book really grabs me the way some other books have this year. Ahhh feels good to get that out. If you have read or are going to read this book then I hope you enjoy it. Just because I didn't doesn't mean you won't. I guess what I'm trying to say is, that it wasn't a bad book (trust me if it was I wouldn't of gotten past the first 50) I just didn't think it was that exciting or had much meat to the plot.

Okay, that's all I have for now. Until next time people!

<3's Laterz!


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