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A review by bookbosomed_jess
The Gates of Evangeline by Hester Young
4.0
A touch of romance, a sprinkling of psychic powers and a whole lot of family drama, The Gates of Evangeline was an enjoyable quick read with a likable enough protagonist, an engaging enough mystery, and the promise of an even better follow up.
Books like this one are self-contained; there are X amount of things that can happen in Y amount of pages. To that end, very few books actually shock me. The twists have a limited amount of pages in which they can occur but there also has to be sufficient breadcrumbing for them to make sense in hindsight.
I guessed the twist the second it was mentioned that Noah and Gabriel were the same age, and this sentence is being written a third of the way into the book because I’m just that confident in my guess. With that said, it’s not the shock that makes a twist worthwhile, rather it’s the execution, because as I said, so few books actually shock me. The timing of the reveal and the slow burn of learning more about Gabriel’s parents was done very well and is easily the book’s best attribute. While the Hettie/Sean stuff was not unpredictable, everything was tied together perfectly.
My one prevailing issue I had was these little moments in Charlie’s head that were very off-putting. The incredible amount of disdain Charlie has for these southern folk, from the “gun-toting, deer-hunting” Noah, to the cook Leeann, described as “an overweight, uneducated twenty-three-year-old unwed mother who had lived her entire life in Chicory, Louisiana... never been out of state, and her only goals in life are to marry her hard-to-pin-down boyfriend and have more children” made me like her so much less. I grew up in literally the same town (Stamford, CT) as she is supposed to be from and the snotty, arrogant, intolerably liberal way the author portrays her protagonist at times just doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, homophobia is objectively bad, but God forbid someone is licensed to carry a gun, or someones’ highest aspiration is to be a wife and mother. And we’re supposed to warm over when Charlie accepts these people, flaws and all? You don’t get extra credit for being accepting of different cultures.
I enjoyed the way Young handled the psychic aspect of the story though it could’ve done without the inherited aspect. Grandma kinda sorta having powers really didn’t add anything to the story for me. It seems this book is part of a trilogy so hopefully Charlie will be a bit less uppity in her New Englander elitism in the next book.
Books like this one are self-contained; there are X amount of things that can happen in Y amount of pages. To that end, very few books actually shock me. The twists have a limited amount of pages in which they can occur but there also has to be sufficient breadcrumbing for them to make sense in hindsight.
I guessed the twist the second it was mentioned that Noah and Gabriel were the same age, and this sentence is being written a third of the way into the book because I’m just that confident in my guess. With that said, it’s not the shock that makes a twist worthwhile, rather it’s the execution, because as I said, so few books actually shock me. The timing of the reveal and the slow burn of learning more about Gabriel’s parents was done very well and is easily the book’s best attribute. While the Hettie/Sean stuff was not unpredictable, everything was tied together perfectly.
My one prevailing issue I had was these little moments in Charlie’s head that were very off-putting. The incredible amount of disdain Charlie has for these southern folk, from the “gun-toting, deer-hunting” Noah, to the cook Leeann, described as “an overweight, uneducated twenty-three-year-old unwed mother who had lived her entire life in Chicory, Louisiana... never been out of state, and her only goals in life are to marry her hard-to-pin-down boyfriend and have more children” made me like her so much less. I grew up in literally the same town (Stamford, CT) as she is supposed to be from and the snotty, arrogant, intolerably liberal way the author portrays her protagonist at times just doesn’t sit well with me. Sure, homophobia is objectively bad, but God forbid someone is licensed to carry a gun, or someones’ highest aspiration is to be a wife and mother. And we’re supposed to warm over when Charlie accepts these people, flaws and all? You don’t get extra credit for being accepting of different cultures.
I enjoyed the way Young handled the psychic aspect of the story though it could’ve done without the inherited aspect. Grandma kinda sorta having powers really didn’t add anything to the story for me. It seems this book is part of a trilogy so hopefully Charlie will be a bit less uppity in her New Englander elitism in the next book.