Author Rachel Morgan contacted me recently and asked if I'd like to review her new novella, Forgiven. Of course I wanted to because the book is clean New Adult! Something that seems to be missing a lot of the time in the book industry.
Forgiven
by Rachel Morgan
Reading Grade: New Adult (novella)
Genre: Contemporary (clean)
My Rating: 4/5 stars.
Finally, some New Adult fiction clean enough for me to read! I’m very happy about that. It’s not like I feel the need to read all that much contemporary NA, but I like that an author went out of her way to be different from the rest of the NA writing crowd.
I don’t think I qualify as the best person to review contemporary realism because I usually like my stories to have a supernatural or science fiction element to them. For me, there is always this feeling like something is missing when I read a book that only uses the real world for what it is capable of doing. But, I tried my best to weigh this book against what I know makes a good piece of fiction, and I think it comes out very good.
The plot is very interesting and doesn’t have a lot going on in it, but it really shouldn’t, anyway. It’s pretty much perfect for this type of story and considering that it is a novella, you don’t have room for a detailed plot. But, what this story does excel at is a little something called suspense. This is when you have to keep reading because you want to know so badly how everything will turn out in the end. In this case, I wanted to know so badly why Julia suddenly ran away from home without warning, ten months earlier, and why she suddenly decided to go back home for a two week vacation.
Why did she not even communicate with anyone, not even her mother and father while she was gone? Even when Julia does return home to Durban, South Africa from London, she refuses to explain why she left in the first place. It is very serious stuff. The suspense is literally devised to kill you—and for that, I think this story deserves most of its praise. This is one of the best parts about any kind of storytelling and it made me all the more excited to keep reading.
The only drawback I can think of is that it is too short to accomplish what a story like this needs to accomplish, which is character and relationship development. I think these stories do better in a slightly longer format for this reason, mainly, and this story exemplifies why that is. Everything it has going for it, otherwise, is really great—we even have a few great characters, like Nan and little Sophie. But, we don’t get to spend enough time with any of them to satisfy. That’s where I say I’d like to have seen this at least double in length.
I know that this story is only meant to be a prequel novella to a series of novels, so I probably will get my wish. It does succeed as being a great appetizer for the future novels that will have more room for the character and relationship exploration factor. With that done well, these books will be the best clean NA out there. By itself, Forgiven is a great read, but it’s even better knowing there is much more to come after this.
It's also FREE, so go grabby-hands a copy of this puppy.....
