Author: Gordon Dahlquist
The first word that comes to mind to describe this book is "strange."
It was a really fascinating premise -- four virtually identical girls, clearly not quite human but believing that they are, lives suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a very human girl, the first they've ever known. Suddenly questions are everywhere as they struggle to figure out May's past and what will happen now.
I loved watching the story develop and piecing together the clues to get the bigger picture of what was going on, and as much as the premise and writing style were strange, I enjoyed them, too.
What bothered me about The Different Girl was the ending. There's all this buildup, all these clues, to something Big that has happened that the girls on their island don't know about, and the story pushes and pushes towards this big reveal of this Event, and then --
Nope.
Maybe there was another point to the story and I just didn't see it, but I felt like there was a lot of buildup, a lot of pointed questions asked, that were just let go. No answers, nothing was actually explained. You can draw a lot of pictures in your head of what this world looks like, but none of them are very clear.
This was still an interesting read and not one that I would dismiss outright; I definitely enjoyed reading it. But I also felt like it had a lot of potential to be something great and didn't quite offer enough information to actually get there.
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