I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for the opportunity to read this book!
I live in a placid town by a placid little seaside, where everyone is born and bred to wear placid little faces. I live by a placid little bridge that goes up and down, separating one side of the placid little river from the other at placid little intervals. But I am a roiling-insides girl and I feel the tide coming in and I need to escape.
This book really surprised me! When I read the blurb, I was expecting a contemporary roadtrip-type YA, and while that's sorta what I got, I also got something entirely different.
I'll admit that it took me a while to warm up to Placid Girl. I had a hard time, initially, growing accustomed to Hallie's voice. Pieces of the prose definitely didn't work for me - I mentally stumbled a few times while reading because certain imagery just didn't work for me at all - but I pressed on, and I'm glad I did. This book was so much more than I first thought. The book is also a bit slow to start, but once things got rolling, I had a really hard time tearing myself away.
Music was a pretty huge part of my late high school & early college years, though not as much as it was for some of my friends... but the musical aspects of this story fit comfortably into that part of me. That was sooooo nice. I enjoyed the lyric snippets, especially. Some weren't to my taste, but I really liked others. There's also a really creepy undertone threaded throughout the book, which definitely kept me turning the pages, wondering what was going to come out of it.
Overall, Placid Girl is a slow build in the beginning, but it took me places I DEFINITELY didn't expect. I really enjoyed it.
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