Nydia HETHERINGTON : A girl made of air

This is the story of The Greatest Funambulist Who Ever Lived...
Born into a post-war circus family, our nameless star was unwanted and forgotten, abandoned in the shadows of the big top. until the bright light of Serendipity Wilson threw her into focus. Now an adult, haunted by an incident in which a child was lost from the circus, our narrator, a tightrope artiste, weaves together her spellbinding tales of circus legends, earthy magic and folklore, all in the hope of finding the child... But will her story be enough to bring the pair together again ?

I was browsing Netgalley when this gorgeous cover caught my eye. I read the summary and it looked unusual and interesting, so I requested it, began to read it... felt blocked from the start and had a hard time finishing it. Of course, almost everybody on Goodreads seems to love it !

To be honest, it might be a case of "it's not the book, it's me" because when I reached the second part of the story, I liked it better, began to appreciate the style. Unfortunately, I didn't care much about the characters, so even if I finally liked the writing, I still hard a hard time reading about them.

The book opens with the age-old trick of the interview of a celebrity. I've read it before, I'll probably read it again, but it felt contrived, the questions/answers and the supposed chemistry between journalist and artist felt unnatural. I was told, not shown. Then we read about the childhood of Mouse and it hardly kept my interest until we reached Marina's letter... The story she told was awful and you understood many things, saw her under a different light, but it was a sort of story I've read before. And the rhythm of the whole book was slow. I don't mind slow, usually, when it's interesting, but there I wasn't riveted.

I finally reached the end with a sigh of relief and of course, there was a twist that everybody is supposed to gasp at : I was just happy to have finished.

If this author writes anything else, I'll probably give it a try because there was definitely something in her style and her stories of ghosts, legends and all that. But just now, I need to read something completely different.