Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The character development is fantastically unrealistic. Check out page 103. This is the first day that a 14 year old girl begins her education. In the last 7 years, she's experienced little to no human interaction. Her human development is arrested at best - similar to a 7 year old but more likely closer to a 5 year old given that she's had little to no experience with human care, behavior or language. Now a kind boy is planning to teach her to read using an almanac as a tool. Miraculously, in one afternoon she learns all the sounds of the alphabet, learns basic phonetics to say the word "cab" and then reads "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot". Having taught my two children to read as well as an illiterate 13 year old boy - this scene is pure nonsense. The following words are not read phonetically: there, some, who live, out. She then tells, the boy "I didn't know a sentence could be so full". OK, now I'm supposed to believe that this severely neglected 14 year old has the word "sentence" in her vocabulary. As a feral child, she knows other unusual words without any context: pearls, football, guilt etc. She can read the word "pleistocene" but on the next page confesses that she cannot count beyond the number 29. You'd imagine that her speech is horribly broken, but after one year of limited tutoring from her boyfriend, she develops a few years later into the most articulate character in the book (see page 160). Seriously?! She's a genius self-taught artist at both watercolor and oils (a destitute girl often starving in the marsh has turpentine for oils and clean watercolor paper?!). Her character is a total fantasy. Then other characters are totally predictable. The star handsome athlete whose married parents rooted in the community as owners of the local gas station - they are the villains. This is a poorly conceived book that I recommend to no one.