The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin
Published: September 27th 2011 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Amazon: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (The Mara Dyer Trilogy, Band 1)
Mara Dyer believes life can’t get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there.
It can.
She believes there must be more to the accident she can’t remember that killed her friends and left her strangely unharmed.
There is.
She doesn’t believe that after everything she’s been through, she can fall in love.
She’s wrong.
I first read this book a few years ago and I absolutely loved it. I also read book 2 and enjoyed it just as much, but for some reason, I never actually picked up book 3! So, I thought I would have a re read of the first two books, so that I could finally pick up number three and then pick up the new instalment in this world – The Becoming of Noah Shaw! I loved this book just as much as the first time I read it and I cannot wait to move on to book 2!
Mara Dyer is a completely unreliable narrator. She suffers from PTSD after an accident that happened, so she hallucinates a lot and struggles to figure out what is real and what isn’t. As a reader, this makes it difficult to determine what is real and what isn’t and as soon as you think you have it figured out, something else happens to bring it all back into question. This left me completely on my toes, even though I read the book already.
I forgot just how great a character Noah is. He tries to help Mara, even though he knows he doesn’t have to and he sticks by her no matter how crazy she gets. I do wonder from where he knows her, because that was a detail that I completely forgot about and picked back up after my re read, so I am looking forward to seeing how these two are connected – where one character remembers and the other one doesn’t.
I wish we saw more of Jamie. I loved his character and the way he tried to help Mara based on his own experiences, even if they were slightly jaded or misplaced. He was an honest character and someone who really was a friend to Mara from the very beginning of the book and it was sad that we didn’t get to see much of him because of what happened – I am hoping that he will turn up some time later in the story again.
I loved the fact that Mara had an actual family at home who worried about her. A lot of books, whether contemporary or fantasy, often have missing family members or none because of certain circumstances etc. So it was a nice change to see a set of parents, together who, whilst they may have argued, cared about Mara and what happened to her and were willing to protect her – even if Mara thought they were being too overprotective. Daniel is a great support system for Mara, as well as being the annoying brother sometimes, which balanced out his actions some.
The plot kept me on my toes, largely because we didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t and the fact that certain things started happening without any idea as to why etc. I loved the way that everyday news helped make the plot what it was and it was done a subtle way that crept up the on the reader, rather than just being there in your face.
All in all, I loved this book as much as I loved it the first time! I am absolutely looking forward to re reading book two and I cannot wait for my copy to get here so that I can! I gave this book 5/5 stars.
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