This ARC was courtesy of Random House Books for Young Readers. All opinions in this review are solely my own.
Dust Girl is a very interesting and inventive story. It has a setting that I have never seen, and never would have expected, in urban fantasy. The Dust Bowl.
This story is about a seventeen-year-old girl named Callie. She lives a somewhat quaint life in a town that is slowly crumbling as more and more people leave for California. However, everything changes when her eccentric mother disappears and she is thrust into the world of the fey.
It is a very cool premises, however the execution for me was the problem, but I will get to that later. This story is very fast paced once it got going, which I appreciated. Once this story was on its way it was a dead sprint for Kansas City (you will understand when you read the book) and along the way you meet some interesting characters. I was especially surprised, pleasantly though, when some of the characters that seemed unimportant in the story actually turned out to be key players in the book. To me, the fact that there was that intentional writing there proves to me that Sarah Zettel is a gifted author.
Unfortunately, there were some aspects of Dust Girl that I did not enjoy so much. I know I mentioned before how much I appreciated the break neck pace of the story, but the pacing itself was a bit of an issue. It took nearly sixty or seventy pages for the book to really take off for me, and that would not be as bad if the book was not less than three hundred pages already. Having that much “dead space” (for lack of a better term) at the beginning of a novel is one of my pet peeves. Throughout most of the book though, the pacing was very well done. However, at the end of the book it was a problem again. The end was one giant whirlwind of events. While I enjoy a lot to happen at the ending of a novel I do not want to feel thoroughly confused in the process. Too much was going on all at once for me to understand and then it cut off with a cliffhanger-ish ending that left me saying, “What?”
The second problem I had with Dust Girl was the emotion of the character. Callie was a character that overall was not really relatable. She never seemed to become sad, no matter how down on her luck she was. Even when her mother disappeared she almost seemed to feign sadness, it never really hit home with me. Then all of a sudden, most of the way through the book she suddenly has more emotion and her character does a complete 180, which truly tested my suspension of disbelief. I wanted to like Callie, but her lack of emotion and then sudden change made it hard for me ever to form a connection with her as a character.
My third point, which not so much a complaint as more of a speculation, is that I presume the second book in the trilogy will have much more world building. I say this, and here’s is my complaint, because there was not very much world building in this story. When there was more information on magic and the fey it was very well done and creative, but there was a distinct lack of it until the finale of the story. So, if anything, I wished that there was more world building, but I know that there will be more in further books and for now that has sated my appetite for the fey.
Overall, Dust Girl was an original book with an interesting setting and an inventive way to showcase fairies. Even though the ending was confusing, I see enough promise in the series as a whole that I will probably read the sequel when it comes out.
Visit Sarah Zettel at her website here.
Content:
-Language: None.
-Violence: Only a few instances and none are graphic in the least.
-Sexuality: None at all.
-I recommend this novel for ages 10 and up (so, pretty much all ages).
My Rating:
7.5/10
-Dylan
