L.A.L.'s Reviews > The Unmaking of June Farrow

I was reading a different book but this one kept interrupting me. The red door on the cover just too tempting to keep ignoring. I had been ignoring this book because I didn't care for her YA book The Girl the Sea Gave Back. But the red door kept calling to me. (Don't you hate it when books get fussy and demanding that you read them?) And so I finally put down the other book and picked this one up just to shush it. I thought I’d read a couple of chapters then go back to my other book.

That was a few hours ago and now I’ve finished this one and wondering what the heck just happened.

I will admit that despite my dislike of the other book of hers that I read, Ms. Young certainly made up for it in this one. Maybe the difference is that one was set in an entirely fiction fantasy place and this one, while Jasper, NC doesn't exist, (at least not where it is in this book. There actually is a Jasper, NC over on the eastern side of the state near Morehead City, about 5.5 hours east of Asheville, whereas this Jasper is supposed to be north of Asheville, nearish the TN border.) the area she describes, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, are quite real.

I don't know what the difference is, but either way, I enjoyed this one far more.

She has crafted a beautiful, emotionally compelling story. The characters here feel authentic. And the time travel element, while a bit convoluted as most time traveling stories are, worked for me. (Honestly, as long as it makes sense for the purposes of the story, I really don't try to think about it all that much.) The one thing that I thought she might explore more is how and why the curse came to be. I mean if you're going to call it a curse, then that presumes that someone placed it upon the Farrow family. Curses just don't pop out of nowhere. I think that's the one main flaw with this story. Where did the curse come from? Where did the locket come from? Where did the rules, like the 3 times rule, come from?

This one wasn’t on my #wyrdandwonder TBR, but I’m also not very good at following my own rules. Besides, this book was being cranky because I had been ignoring it. Sometimes the books know best & in this case, it was right. I did enjoy this story. 3.75 stars rounded up.