Finding Magdalena by Shannon Cordon
Summary
“Magdalena “Maggie” Curran is a freshman at a prestigious Virginia boarding school when she suffers an unbearable tragedy. Maggie has only one true friend to lean on—Graham Ashford. He is the only one who can help her through the depression and night terrors that follow.
In her junior year, the school deems her stable enough to have a roommate, and her new friend Sarah quickly draws Maggie out of her shyness and into the dating world. While at Sarah’s house for Thanksgiving, however, she meets Sarah’s older brother, Eric, and what starts as a shy crush soon turns into terror as Eric becomes obsessed and violent toward Maggie.
Maggie runs to the safety of Graham, now her boyfriend. But not even Graham can protect her from Eric when he assaults her in her dorm room. Eric is given a light sentence in a mental institution, and Maggie leaves everything behind and moves to her mother’s hometown of Malaga, Spain, to attend college on a music scholarship and try to find her mother’s estranged family.
Beginning with the death of her parents, Maggie has had to reach inside herself to find the strength and resilience to move on. This book will capture your heart in the first few pages and hold you until the shattering climax.”
-From Goodreads.com
Reivew
So this review has been coming for a while due to having this book sitting in my ‘to be read’ pile and never actually getting to it as I was too busy with University work. However, I finally finished sat down and got through it in about 24 hours and I have to say it definitely wasn’t what I expected.
In the beginning it was a traditional YA romance novel with teens in relationships and having issues and breakups, then there was a little sex (that was “graphic”, so I would classify this as a more mature YA novel), then there was this violent dude, and then there was more relationships, and then more violence and I was just like what? I couldn’t keep up with everything and it kept you guessing as to what was going to be happening next, which was good, and bad. My one complaint was that all of this happened in about 350 pages which was a little bit too much in just many pages. I could see this book put into two books to make it a series to prolong the story as I did feel that towards the end it was rushed a bit, bad people being caught and all of this other stuff going down. So either to make a longer book or just make it into two books. But it was YA and I am reading it from an adult perspective and adult books do have more description. For YA it was good though, but as it was more mature YA, some of the things could have been expanded a little bit.
It did go from 0-100 quite fast in moments where one of the characters attacked someone else and then there was a threat of rape and I was kind of there like…wait what?
For the sex, besides the first sex scene which wasn’t bad but went into a little bit of detail, all the other mentions of sex did the ‘drawn-curtain’ kind of scene where it would gloss over the event which was nice.
Honestly, overall it was quite good though. There was some character development, but not a ton. I didn’t love how Maggie was kind of a whiny girl, crying over everything. I did want to sometimes shake her and tell her to grow up. She’d cry over small things. Don’t get me wrong, I know she had been through a lot in the story but she would cry over the sillies of things and I just wanted to smack her. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because if a writer and bring about an emotion in me while I am readying their writing, then that is pretty darn good. Whether it be bad or good.
I do recommend it as it is a decent read and you can probably fly through it quite fast and it is new so show some love!
But overall, a perfect YA kind of book!
Happy Reading!
