Blue by Lou Aronica is a very difficult book to review. It is a very emotional book, and I’m the kind of person who has to drink gallons and gallons of water after watching Titanic to rehydrate myself. Yet while reading Blue, I never shed a single tear.
Chris Astor is a man in his early forties who is going through the toughest stretch of his life. Becky is Chris’s fourteen-year-old daughter, a girl who overcame enormous challenges to become a vibrant, vital young woman – and now faces her greatest obstacle yet. Miea is the young queen of a fantasy land that Becky and Chris created when Becky was little, a fantasy land that has developed a life of its own and now finds itself in terrible, maybe fatal trouble. Together, Chris, Becky, and Miea need to uncover a secret. The secret to why their worlds have joined at this moment. The secret to their purpose. The secret to the future. It is a secret that, when discovered, will redefine imagination for all of them. Blue is a novel of trial and hope, invention and rediscovery. It might very well take you someplace you never knew existed.
It’s really hard to enjoy a book when you absolutely can’t connect with any of the characters and that was my only problem with Blue. I couldn’t connect with Chris because I’m not a parent and don’t understand that whole “My child is my life” attitude; Becky was too young for me and Miea was too much of a workaholic for me. They each had their own depth but there just wasn’t any kind of connection.
On the other hand, the idea of an imaginary world that came to life but evolved into it’s own world is such an interesting, intriguing story. Unfortunately, the plot itself was slow and more focused on the characters/their emotions than the imaginary world. That’s not to say it wasn’t a key part of Blue, it’s just that because I had no connection with the characters, I couldn’t connect with their imaginary world like I had wanted to.
As I said before, the plot was slow because the first several chapters were merely giving the background story with thoughts/memories from the different characters and not with actions. The constant point of view jumping between characters only added to the slowness. There wasn’t a distinction between the different point of views, which made it confusing.
While I can see how other people might enjoy Blue, there was absolutely no spark of interest for me.
