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A review by reading_rainy
Girl Under Glass by Monica Enderle Pierce
4.0
First of all, this book cover is awesome! This is a sci-fi dystopian, kinda romance? The first half of the book was so good, the world building reminded me a little of that M. Night Shyamalan movie The Village where everyone has reverted back to Puritan behavior. A six hour Sunday sermon, shunning people, public beatings?!
Our heroine, Rachel has survived the killing of her parents when she was fourteen. Her father was an interrupter between humans and the alien race when they first came to Earth. Her parents believed the aliens meant Earth no harm, then all hell broke loose.
The book begins with Rachel and her daughter, they are living alone with two dogs for protection. You learn early on that Rachel was raped and her daughter is the product of that. Rachel adores Pearl. They have been ostracized by the village (because the rape and subsequent child showed that Rachel was not a pure woman), and are allowed to stay because Rachel is a medic of sorts.
One day a wounded alien appears and Rachel takes care of him. The romance aspect was odd and felt forced. One minute Rachel’s taking care of this alien man, Ehtishem, and the next, he’s admitting he has feelings for her and they start making out? I get that his culture doesn’t show many emotions, but something to hint that he was interested, or some kind of build-up to that would have been nice.
The second half of the book fell flat for me. There were too many characters, plot lines flying all over the place and I was confused. It doesn’t help that Rachel has these traumatic flashbacks, so the reader can’t really trust what’s going on.
There is a moment towards the end that Rachel has to get a huge facial tattoo to show that she ‘belongs’ or is owned by Ehtishem. There is zero point to this as two second later the plot changes. Maybe the tattoo will have more significance in the second book…which I will be reading since I purchased book one and two together.
This story is clunky, doesn’t flow well, felt disorganized and fragmented, but I still really enjoyed all the ideas here.
Our heroine, Rachel has survived the killing of her parents when she was fourteen. Her father was an interrupter between humans and the alien race when they first came to Earth. Her parents believed the aliens meant Earth no harm, then all hell broke loose.
The book begins with Rachel and her daughter, they are living alone with two dogs for protection. You learn early on that Rachel was raped and her daughter is the product of that. Rachel adores Pearl. They have been ostracized by the village (because the rape and subsequent child showed that Rachel was not a pure woman), and are allowed to stay because Rachel is a medic of sorts.
One day a wounded alien appears and Rachel takes care of him. The romance aspect was odd and felt forced. One minute Rachel’s taking care of this alien man, Ehtishem, and the next, he’s admitting he has feelings for her and they start making out? I get that his culture doesn’t show many emotions, but something to hint that he was interested, or some kind of build-up to that would have been nice.
The second half of the book fell flat for me. There were too many characters, plot lines flying all over the place and I was confused. It doesn’t help that Rachel has these traumatic flashbacks, so the reader can’t really trust what’s going on.
There is a moment towards the end that Rachel has to get a huge facial tattoo to show that she ‘belongs’ or is owned by Ehtishem. There is zero point to this as two second later the plot changes. Maybe the tattoo will have more significance in the second book…which I will be reading since I purchased book one and two together.
This story is clunky, doesn’t flow well, felt disorganized and fragmented, but I still really enjoyed all the ideas here.