A Place Called Here
Feb. 26th, 2025 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI picked up three Cecelia Ahern books at the local station book exchange and I've read two of them in the last couple of weeks.
I got the impression (from the first book and my own vague knowledge of the author) that Cecelia Ahern's books were entirely real-world - so it took me rather by surprise when A Place Called Here turned out to be portal fantasy.
Protagonist Sandy runs a missing persons agency but, on a trip to meet a man with a missing brother, she gets transported to another realm, which is where missing people and items go...
It's an interesting concept and I like the fact that Ahern's protagonists are in their mid-30s (based on reading two of her books). But this one is a lot clunkier than the other one I read - the first 23 pages have no direct action and are all entirely background summary, and even when the story proper starts, the ratio of background summary to direct action is very unbalanced. The chapters are very short, but the plot is very slow, at least in the first half.
There's also a very problematical romance aspect that made me very uncomfortable - and despite depicting exactly why a therapist should never date one of their patients (especially when the therapy started when the patient was 14...), it's not presented in the story as being a bad idea...
Things pick up quite a bit in the second half, when we get to know a lot more of the people who live in the realm of Here, and some aspects of the story are very well handled.
Some aspects of the ending were satisfying but others very much not (one romance strand yay - the other definitely nay), and I'm not sure the ambiguity or lack thereof surrounding whether or not Here is real worked for me. But I enjoyed the book overall, and am looking forward to reading the other Ahern on my shelf.
I got the impression (from the first book and my own vague knowledge of the author) that Cecelia Ahern's books were entirely real-world - so it took me rather by surprise when A Place Called Here turned out to be portal fantasy.
Protagonist Sandy runs a missing persons agency but, on a trip to meet a man with a missing brother, she gets transported to another realm, which is where missing people and items go...
It's an interesting concept and I like the fact that Ahern's protagonists are in their mid-30s (based on reading two of her books). But this one is a lot clunkier than the other one I read - the first 23 pages have no direct action and are all entirely background summary, and even when the story proper starts, the ratio of background summary to direct action is very unbalanced. The chapters are very short, but the plot is very slow, at least in the first half.
There's also a very problematical romance aspect that made me very uncomfortable - and despite depicting exactly why a therapist should never date one of their patients (especially when the therapy started when the patient was 14...), it's not presented in the story as being a bad idea...
Things pick up quite a bit in the second half, when we get to know a lot more of the people who live in the realm of Here, and some aspects of the story are very well handled.
Some aspects of the ending were satisfying but others very much not (one romance strand yay - the other definitely nay), and I'm not sure the ambiguity or lack thereof surrounding whether or not Here is real worked for me. But I enjoyed the book overall, and am looking forward to reading the other Ahern on my shelf.
