Official Review: Within the stars by Rachela marie lavita

[jgreen11]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Within the stars" by Rachela marie lavita.]

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1 out of 4 stars

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“Within the Stars,” by Rachela Marie Lavita, professes itself a children’s story about a young girl named Rebecca on her search for true love. Rebecca is a jealous girl at first, seeing her siblings fall in love and wondering when her turn will come. After meeting a strange woman on her sixteenth birthday, she learns of a prophecy that she, too, will find a spouse at a most unexpected time.

Though a fast read, and full of simple sentences, I would not recommend this book to any child. The words used in the text were much too large to be understood by 4-7 year old children, but the sentence structure and plot was too simple to be catered to children older than that. Characterization, too, was weak. As Lavita described the characters, we learned of the characters’ hair color, but little of their personalities. (However even with the emphasis on hair color, one illustration incorrectly depicted our heroine’s hair color as the color of her sister’s, whom she had envied.)

The content of this story, also, was not content I believe would interest a child, or should even be read to a child. Among other adult themes, the presence of adultery in the book did nothing to help the plot, which was already lacking in movement. I did not eagerly turn pages, wondering what would happen to our heroine. Instead I turned pages to find characters names I didn’t remember and had to go back in the book to look up who these insignificant people were, and why their names were still being used.

On top of all of this, I also did not enjoy this book because the moral of the story was not a good lesson to be learned, in my opinion. This is most likely due to cultural differences between the author and myself. I grew up believing that a woman can be happy without a man beside her. This book, however, is simply a woman’s search for a husband because that’s what society expects of her. Culturally I would not recommend this book to people of the United States.

I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars because it is not a book I would recommend to children or adults. Though it describes many beautiful places in Europe, the plot line is weak and the characterization is confusing. I also found numerous punctuation errors that detracted my attention from the story. Overall this book was a list of events that happened to a girl that I did not have any compassion for.

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Within the stars
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