Book Review
Title: The Mall
Author: Megan McCafferty
Genre: YA/Coming of Age
Rating: **
Review: I didn’t know anything about The Mall when I was offered the chance to review it, so I knew this is going to be a journey for me and it wasn’t a great one. From the very beginning I didn’t like Cassie as a protagonist as she casually mentions using sex as a way to become closer to her boyfriend, Troy after battling mono for several weeks which put me off in the first couple of pages. I also knew something was going on with Troy as it was blatantly obvious in the way he treated Cassie and I had the suspicion that he had moved on with someone else because they are teenagers and I was right.
It took me over a week to finish the Mall because of the issues I had with the plot, characters, pacing etc and if I hadn’t been taking part in the blog tour, I probably would have DNF’d it quite early on. So, let’s drive into the problems I had with The Mall:
1. Characters – I briefly mentioned my dislike of Cassie, the protagonist, which is never a good sign for me. A good protagonist can usually get me through a book I don’t really like. Cassie is annoying, whinny and has severe communication issue which directly result in a lot of “drama” that this book puts forward. If Cassie communicated like anyone else this would be have been a lot shorter and I probably would have liked it more. Tory as an ass (not much else I can say) and the other characters weren’t fleshed out, they felt like cardboard cut outs of people rather than actual people.
2. Pacing – There are serious pacing issues with The Mall, it tries to build some tension and drama that ultimately falls flat. Some parts of the book were so slow it took me days to get through them and in other parts things moved so quickly nothing got the attention it needed which meant as a reader, I didn’t care about what happened.
3. Plot – This is where I had the biggest problem with The Mall, nothing happened. Yes, in the beginning Cassie finds out her boyfriend cheated on her while she was sick, and she got fired. She did get another job and love interest, but these were surface plots, there was nothing deep or meaningful about them, so it felt for the majority of the novel like nothing was happening. Most people will assume this is what coming of age stories are like, but hear me out, I recently read Mayhem by Estelle Laure which for the majority of the novel is a YA coming of age story about a young girl dealing with an abusive stepfather and an estranged family. However, because you really connect with the characters you overlook the slower moments and there is a lot of background tension to keep the reader hooked for the big reveal towards the middle of the story. After that reveal you just fly through the remaining pages. I have also read so many other coming of age stories like The Perks of Being a Wallflower that do “normal” so much better than The Mall. That doesn’t mean that The Mall doesn’t have potential because it did, I just felt like it was wasted focusing on a group of teenagers we didn’t really care about.
Now I’ve discussed the problems let’s move onto the things I liked:
1. Pop culture reference – Much like Ready Player One, The Mall is full of pop culture references and as 90’s child, these genuinely made me laugh and smile, although at times I did feel they were a little overused.
2. Setting – The mall setting of this story was one I hadn’t really seen before but it totally worked as it is the exact place you would expect these characters to spend a lot of their free time and where anything significant might happen.
Overall, while The Mall had some redeeming qualities it just really let me down and for that reason, I can’t rate it higher than 2 stars. I will be keeping an eye on the author and if she puts something out in the future that catches my eye, I will give it a go, but The Mall was a miss for me.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.com
I received this review copy from the publisher as part of a blog tour.
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