Dark Water
By Laura McNeal
The thing that initially caught my attention about Dark Water was the reference to avocado groves. I have a lot of family in Southern California and an in-law who grew up on land that contained over 200 avocado trees when her parents bought it. Combine that with what I have heard about McNeal’s writing and I was extremely curious about this book.
Since I knew this story was about a girl who meets a boy who works in the groves, I was prepared for some high school girl romantic pangs, what I wasn’t expecting was how deeply real this story would turn out to be. The book is about a girl named Pearl and the path her life takes during a time when many things were changing for her. There are a few mentions of a fire throughout the book but most of the story is about Pearl and Amiel, the boy catches her eye with his circus tricks.
Although the fire only takes up a small amount of the actual book, the intensity and reality of it transformed the story into something extremely powerful. That part of the story had the force of someone who had lived through something similar and this confirmed in the Author’s Note.
This is a story full of truth and pain. It is about the stupid decisions and infatuations that make being a teenager exciting but also the consequences of those decisions and the heartbreak that everyone experiences at some point of their life in one form or another.
**Source: Amazon Vine
1 comment:
as crazy as it sounds, i sometimes find myself struggling to remember how certain fruits and veggies grow. asparagus, artichokes, avocado. do they grown on trees, shrubs? i'm so agriculturally idiotic! happy to see this novel wasn't the typical run of the mill boy-meet-girl and that there was depth to their relationship and the characters. i'll keep an eye out for this at the library! :)
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