Book Review: the World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter

An interesting yet weird story....

The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter
Available at Publisher
Literature Mystery

My rating for The World Before Us: 3 Stars

When Jane Standen was just 15 and a temporary nanny, the little girl she was watching, Lily, disappeared. Now many years later she is back in the area, working at a natural history museum that is closing up. Jane is determined to find the answers to Lily’s disappearance as well as the disappearance of another girl who disappeared over a hundred years before. What Jane finds is more than answers to the disappearances but also who she is. As secrets and more come out into the open, the life Jane only dreams of becomes a reality…if Jane lets herself believe again.

Okay first and foremost this was a complex and complicated book for me to get into. As much as I enjoyed this author’s writing style, the story left much to be desired. There was just enough detail to keep the reader interested and the characters were well written. What I had issues were how this author would go off and leave the questions unanswered, then go off to another question. It was so open ended that after I finished I still didn’t have a clear idea who or what those answers were. The answers to Lily’s and the other girl’s disappearance were never answered and I felt the author had all the tools to give the reader a great story but fell far short in the end.

The characters were well written but there were too m any point of views, constant time shifts from one era to another and it felt like I needed a score card to keep track of them all. This was a confusing book overall for me to read and finish. I kept putting it down, picking it up, putting it down again. There were scenes that I thought would meld into the story but never went anywhere. The author tries but it seems she has all these ideas she wants to incorporate into the story that at times, I felt a bit lost while reading THE WORLD BEFORE US. The constant point of view shifts, the mindless scenes where questions you thought might be answered are not and more are what really put me off from giving this a higher rating. The author tries but I felt they fell just a bit short of the mark they wanted to hit with this book.

If you have a few quiet days and like to read some interesting literature, then I would recommend THE WORLD BEFORE US.

I received this book from Blogging for books for a review

About the author:

AISLINN HUNTER’s acclaimed collection of stories, What’s Left Us, was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Prize. Her poetry, Into the Early Hours, was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection of poetry The Possible Past was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. Her novel Stay (2002; reissued in 2013 by Anchor Canada) was a Globe and Mail ”Top 100″ book, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and has recently been made into a feature film starring Aidan Quinn and Taylor Schilling. The World Before Us is her first book of fiction in twelve years. After travelling to London and Edinburgh over the past few years to study for a PhD, Hunter now lives and teaches in Vancouver, British Columbia.