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y Sophia Hildenbrand
When I was picking out a book to read for English class, I was a little nervous because I had read many books for classes and I had not liked a lot of them. Then I didn’t want to read them, and I had to force myself to read them. This book was the opposite experience for me. I have really liked reading/listening to this book; it caught my attention, and I found myself being excited about it, so I thought I would write a review.
Being excited about a book is something that is actually really hard for me to do, but it was so easy with “The Dutch House.”
To start, the plot was so good, because it always kept me guessing about what was going to happen in the next chapter. The book is about a man going through life after his mom left his family, to help people in need, and how this affects him in his life, and what happens to him and the rest of his family for about the next 40 years.
The book doesn’t start with the fact that their mom left, it starts with Danny and Maeve meeting a woman that their father is dating.
The book states that, “she is the first woman our father had brought home since our mother left” (p. 7). I like that she started the novel out this way because it’s not straight into the Mom leaving, which shows a little bit of life, and then backtracks a little bit, and then continues.
Another reason why this book was so easy for me to read is the way that the author wrote it. She wrote it in short chapters, which was good for me because I have a short attention span sometimes. And the wording she chose for the whole book also made it easy to read.
One thing about this book that I am not sure if I like it or not is that it kind of jumps around; it will be in one place when they are one age and then have a memory of something, or it’ll jump forward.
One of my favorite Parts about this book is that Danny and his sister Maeve are so close, and the author really highlights that throughout the book. Danny doesn’t do a lot without his sister, and that’s something that I found very interesting.
The only thing that I didn’t necessarily love is the fact that the story is narrated by Danny. I wish that they had done a little bit in everybody’s perspective, so we’re not just seeing the story from Danny’s eyes.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a great read. It’s a shorter novel, so it won’t take a super long time to read. The audiobook was about nine hours, and it’s read by Tom Hanks, which I also feel was a really good addition for me because he read the story so well that it was easy to listen to.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This page was made possible thanks to English Professor Paula LaRochelle, who gave students in her English 1118 class the option to write a shorter version of their book review for publication. The two published in this issue were chosen by Echo Staff from nine submissions.
Our thanks to the other students who submitted work: Lyndee Dedlmajer, Taylor Kurtz, Aidan Steele, Elayna Domaille, Iris Anderson, Suwah Kulee, and Annie Heindel.