I read Buried by Robin Merrow MacCready a few months ago with my high school students book club. I have been dragging my feet to review it... as where all the girls in my group. You see, we picked the book because it is about a young girl dealing with her mothers addiction to alcohol... and a lot of my kids have experienced something similar. We try to pick books they can relate to and discuss- bibliotherapy, basically. However, none of us seemed to be able to look further than face value. Buried had a great theme and a pretty decent story line- unfortunately, we had all heard it before and read other books with similar themes, thinking this would be "different". It wasn't. Not only was it a really slow and dry read, with few hooks to keep you pressing on, but the writing wasn't that spectacular. Now, I know I can be pretty biased when it comes to writing (not that I am a great writer). But I was surprised when all my girls wanted to drop the book and not even finish it. The reason: too slow, and poorly written. We did end of finishing it, and were able to get some great discussions out of it. We talked not only about parallels to their lives, but also about the writing in general- why they didn't like it, etc. Buried is a typical tale about a girl dealing with keeping things perfect on the outside while her mothers keeps things hectic and unpredictable. The book would have been a great YA read if it was able to keep our attention and the editing was better. I wouldn't reccommend this book... which is unfortunate, cause I really don't like to give such a poor review... but I gotta be honest!
write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow
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