Another Dimension in Book Reviews

Do you sign up on every blog you can to win the free stuff the author is giving away? I am always tempted to do that, but then when the free stuff comes – which is almost always a book – I feel obligated to drop everything, read the book and then give it a glowing review. I know that is just the nagging guilt in my head, and that book reviewers always close their article with, “I did not give this book a good review just because I got it for free.”
Sigh. What’s a girl to do who has a penchant for free stuff, who does all her shopping at Goodwill and won’t shop in a regular store unless she has coupons?
So here we are with another book review to write. With a buildup like the one above, you are probably thinking that this book stunk. It really didn’t.
I won “Seventh Dimension – The Door” by Lorilyn Roberts by commenting on someone else’s blog. It is a Christian young adult fantasy and actually I had wanted to get it to share with my Kinship kid (that has yet to happen, but hopefully this weekend I’ll remember to give it to her).
Maybe it was because of the genre, but I really didn’t know at first if I could finish this book. When the animals started talking, I said to myself that I don’t have time for this. But I hung in there and I’m glad that I did. Like I said, it took a while to get into it, but by the time I was half-way through, I couldn’t put it down. I just couldn’t see how this was all going to get wrapped up into a satisfying ending. But it did.
The book tells the coming-of-age story of Shale Snyder who gets pulled into a world far from her own. Or is it that far away? The more I read about her adventures, the more comfortable I was in her new environment – a place which I have read about many times.
Putting my prejudices against talking animals aside (and this is actually explained later on in the book), I would give the book 4 out of 5 stars.