dramastef's Full Review: Robin Stevenson - A Thousand Shades of Blue
Spending a year sailing around the Bahamas seems like it would be something any sixteen-year-old girl would love to do, but things aren't often what they appear from the outside. It's clear from the very beginning of Robin Stevenson's YA novel A Thousand Shades of Blue that the voyage is a last attempt at mending a broken family, and most likely a failing attempt.
Rachel knows her friends are envious of her parents' decision to take a year away from their lives and sail around the Bahamas, but in reality, it's nothing like what they thought it would be. Her mother and father haven't been getting along, her twelve-year-old brother Tim is hardly the best company and the only privacy she can ever find is on the foredeck of the tiny sailboat.
A Thousand Shades of Blue takes place during a single week, when the family is stranded in Georgetown. Rachel is a normal, angst-ridden teenage girl with self centered thoughts and hormonal roller coasters raging inside her. This book takes that formula and adds water. To be fair, the book does delve a little deeper into Rachel's problems which have their own twists, like everyone's do. They wouldn't be our very own problems if they were exactly like everyone else's now, would they?
In Rachel's world, she has an older sister they've left at home in a group home. Emma suffered a head injury when Rachel was four and during the past year, Rachel has convinced herself that she was to blame. Before this trip from hell, her father hasn't had time to spare for her or Tim in years, which she's sure added to the downfall of her parents' marriage. And of course the fact that she and Tim witnessed her mother's indiscretionary make-out session with the owner of a neighboring boat. Throw in a almost sexual encounter with a twenty-five-year-old slacker and it's no wonder that Rachel is on the edge of exploding at the turn of every page.
I read A Thousand Shades of Blue in a few short hours and found it to be just a smidge above average. The writing was good, but the characters were boring. I found Rachel's brother Tim to be more interesting than Rachel or her parents. I was annoyed that Stevenson employed the tired cliche of Rachel's father being a pediatric shrink who can't understand his own children. I did, however, like the water metaphor used. Before Rachel went on this trip, she couldn't distinguish between the shade of blue water at four feet and the shade of blue water at ten feet, but now she was more adept at differentiating between all of the thousand shades of blue found in the ocean.
There was nothing in this book that would make me warn you to keep it away from your teenager, but there really wasn't anything remarkable either, that would make me recommend it highly. It was a quick, somewhat enjoyable read that I'll probably forget within a week.
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