Megan's review
Me & Emma
by Elizabeth Flock
Megan's review
Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock
Megan's review
rating:
I'm still thinking about this book. That's pretty rare.
This is the story of two sisters, the narrator, who's eight, and her sister, Emma, who's six. Emma is the strong, brave one, but the narrator feels protective of her because their mother doesn't like Emma very much.
Their mother has an abusive boyfriend. There is child abuse in this novel, and at times it's both hard to read and over the top.
The gem here is the narrator. The voice of a young girl is captured perfectly. The author plays a bit with the conceit of the unreliable narrator with spectacular results.
It's hard to say more without SPOILERS. There's a twist at the end of this book that I never saw coming, and I am a champion twist-guesser. That in itself blew me away, but the twist changes everything that's gone before. It's done so skillfully and as a reader I went through layers of processing what it meant, which is why I'm still thinking about it more than a week later.
This is the story of two sisters, the narrator, who's eight, and her sister, Emma, who's six. Emma is the strong, brave one, but the narrator feels protective of her because their mother doesn't like Emma very much.
Their mother has an abusive boyfriend. There is child abuse in this novel, and at times it's both hard to read and over the top.
The gem here is the narrator. The voice of a young girl is captured perfectly. The author plays a bit with the conceit of the unreliable narrator with spectacular results.
It's hard to say more without SPOILERS. There's a twist at the end of this book that I never saw coming, and I am a champion twist-guesser. That in itself blew me away, but the twist changes everything that's gone before. It's done so skillfully and as a reader I went through layers of processing what it meant, which is why I'm still thinking about it more than a week later.
