Dear Hank Williams by Kimberly Willis HoltMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
MOSTLY SPOILER FREE ZONE!
With the admitted caveat that I am not even close to the target audience of this book, I will say I enjoyed it. My worry is, would it appeal to the target audience?
To begin with, it's entirely epistolary. And we get just one side of the conversation. So even while it is fan letters written to Hank Williams, it eventually starts reading like a diary. Fortunately Tate is engaging. Unfortunately most of that engagement is due to the fact that you know she's playing fast and loose with the facts. Truths are doled out slowly. More than once Tate fesses up that she wasn't exactly honest before. I would imagine a lot of this might prove difficult for MG readers. Or, maybe I'm underestimating them.
I felt the M. Night Shyamalan twist was a little over the top, even though I saw it coming a mile off. (Again, I'm not the target audience. Trying to imagine myself as a twelve year old boy reading this, I confess I may have been blown away by the last reveal. For me it was just, yeah, I know. ((I knew about the time the other saleswoman's daughter visited! Yeah, I'm bragging...!)))
A very good MG book. Probably 4.25 or 4.34 if GR allowed fractions.
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