Kiernan Máire

I won this title through the LibraryThing Member Giveaway and it arrived on 7 December 2017.

Disclaimers:
As an adult who also enjoys reading YA, I know I'm not the target audience.

The positives:
- The author sent along some nice book-themed treats. That doesn't affect my review, but it's always nice to find an author who appreciates her readers and reviewers and gets creative with their review packages.
- The protagonist. I'm not saying Meg is someone I'd want to hang out with, but it's easy to see what motivates her, even when she's doing bad things. Aside from a few clunky bits of dialogue, she comes across like a teenager, which is getting rare in YA.
- Consequences. In a lot of YA novels, the past is the past and never comes back to haunt anyone. Here, Meg's past and present are almost constantly at odds. It's a good reminder that actions have consequences.

Your mileage may vary:
- Rather than using the traditional paragraph structure with indents, the author is using a blank space between paragraphs. I've done enough reading and writing online that this format doesn't faze me, but I know some people aren't keen on it.

The negatives:
- Lack of editing. There are a lot of comma errors and quite a few typos. They're mostly common ones ("viscous" instead of "vicious", for example), and another round of careful editing would have cleaned it up nicely. There are also some formatting issues that should have been caught during editing.
- At times, it feels more like an outline than a finished novel. I'm not fond of authors who overdo detail, but I definitely could have done with more here.
- The ending fell flat for me. It almost feels like it was cut off mid-scene. The book is short as it is (not even 200 pages), and when I reached the end, I was wondering where the rest was.

Overall:
FULL OF IT has the bones of a good story. I would be interested in reading more about Meg and how she juggles her ever-increasing number of lies. However, it is very much a skeleton and there needs to be more effort in adding the muscles that really make a story move forward.… (altro)