Weekly Reads: Far Far Away

Far Far Away is another book on my Mock Printz award reading list and has quite a buzz surrounding it. The cover has green smoke on it, so clearly I was drawn to it! I started reading it, and honestly was not getting in to it. I hit page 100 and I asked a co-worker when it started to get good, she responded that if I wasn't already in to it, I might not like it. Well crap.

I took a break and read a few other books. Then picked it back up. Once I got to the halfway point it was amazing. I couldn't put it down. There aren't any chapters in the book, just little page breaks in the story, and I think the disjointedness of that affected my enjoyment of the book. I would just be getting in to the story and there'd be another break. Overall it was a really great read, but not the normal "OMG MUST READ MUST READ" right from the get go, as most books I adore are. And while I don't think this will be a Printz award winning book, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Printz honor selection.

My rating: 4 stars.


Summary from goodreads:

It says quite a lot about Jeremy Johnson Johnson that the strangest thing about him isn't even the fact his mother and father both had the same last name. Jeremy once admitted he's able to hear voices, and the townspeople of Never Better have treated him like an outsider since. 

After his mother left, his father became a recluse, and it's been up to Jeremy to support the family. But it hasn't been up to Jeremy alone. The truth is, Jeremy can hear voices. Or, specifically, one voice: the voice of the ghost of Jacob Grimm, one half of the infamous writing duo, The Brothers Grimm. 

Jacob watches over Jeremy, protecting him from an unknown dark evil whispered about in the space between this world and the next. But when the provocative local girl Ginger Boultinghouse takes an interest in Jeremy (and his unique abilities), a grim chain of events is put into motion.

And as anyone familiar with the Grimm Brothers know, not all fairy tales have happy endings...