J.A. Belfield

I received a copy of Wander Dust in exchange for an honest review and I wanted to love it, I really did. Unfortunately, it simply had too many issues for me, and I hit the 50% mark and realised I was forcing myself to read on. Well, as I read for relaxation and pleasure, I decided it might be better if I stopped. So this one is a DNF for me.

Why?

Well, whilst I didn’t dislike Sera at all as an MC, I did find her back and forth musings to be pretty contradictory at times, which made her appear fairly unreliable as narrator, and I felt as though I wasn’t really given the goods required for me to connect to her.

I also had a hard time connecting with any of the secondary characters. I’m not sure how much of this was to do with the amount of ‘tell’ in the book overshadowing any ‘show’ that occurred.

On top of this, there was instance on top of instance of POV breaches. With pretty much every side character, the MC ‘tells’ the reader of their motivations/reasons for actions/behaviour when she can’t possibly know this information. Whenever an MC decides the reasoning behind another characters behaviour/actions, this becomes an assumption and should be treated as such, and there needs to be a clear indication as to why the assumption is made. But there was none of this. The entire 50% of the book I read is full of the MC explaining why every other character is doing what they’re doing.

Then we have the very first ‘wormhole’ incidence. The MC is dragged through a wormhole, without ever knowing that she has this ability, or without ever having travelled a wormhole before, yet she decides straight away that she is in a wormhole. Where was the terror and utter confusion she should have been feeling at this situation. I’m sorry, but it was far too convenient a way to tell the reader what was happening instead of allowing the MC to slowly make discoveries and taking the reader along for the ride. I also felt the couple of comparisons to occurrences in other fictional tales was a little lazy for explanation, too.

On top of this, the dialogue between Sera and her aunt was extremely stilted and unnatural sounding. I had a hard time with the flow during their scenes.

And then just after Sera finds out she needs to be at the ‘special’ school, her friends she made at the ‘normal’ school suddenly appear at her special school at exactly the same time as she does with absolutely no question or discussion on this from the MC. Man, this is even more convenient than the wormhole incident.

It was around this point when I realised I wasn’t really enjoying the read, that I was ploughing through rather than being hauled through by intrigue. I did kind of hope the dude in it would tweak my interest enough that he’d make me want to keep going, but it’s taking so long to get to him, maybe because the pace is vastly slowed down by all the over descriptions of everything (I found myself skimming a lot)—descriptions that could have been cut to allow room for more show and plot unfolding and character development … I just got a little fed up of waiting, and when he did make a decent appearance, I found I didn’t like him very much. So I’m definitely going to stop at this point. Sorry, but this wasn’t quite my cup of tea.