Be careful what you believe in.
Rudy’s life is flipped upside-down when his family moves to a remote island in a last attempt to save his sick younger brother. With nothing to do but worry, Rudy sinks deeper and deeper into loneliness and lies awake at night listening to the screams of the ocean beneath his family’s rickety house.
Then he meets Diana, who makes him wonder what he even knows about love, and Teeth, who makes him question what he knows about anything. Rudy can’t remember the last time he felt so connected to someone, but being friends with Teeth is more than a little bit complicated. He soon learns that Teeth has terrible secrets. Violent secrets. Secrets that will force Rudy to choose between his own happiness and his brother’s life.
My second to last book from Molly Horan’s list of 15 Young Adult Books Every Adult Should Read I read was Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz.
I wanted to like this book, I really did, the cover looked neat and the title was intriguing. But alas I didn’t like it. I don’t get what the point or plot of the book was supposed to be. It reminded me of a John Green book, where these kids have all of these epiphanies about the meaning of life at the tender age of 16. And you feel as the reader that your teenage years were completely wasted!
The main problem I have with the book was that it just jumped right into the story without providing background information on the family or the setting. That made it confusing and hard to read, because you could not really get connected to the characters or their story line. I felt like the secondary characters were not well developed either. They were just kind of there. The secondary plots were there but not really developed at all. They brought nothing to the story, didn’t halt the progress of the one plot or speed it up. They were just there.
The major story line fell around the main character Rudy and his struggle between wanting to keep his brother alive and wanting a life. In order to keep his brother alive, they needed to feed him a magical fish. But Rudy meets this fish boy who claims to be related to these special fish and wants Rudy to stop eating the fish and killing his brothers. There then becomes this fight between wanting to please his new friend or keep his brother alive. While
I think the idea of the plot was good, but Moskowitz didn’t develop it enough to keep you interested. Overall the book was a flop in my opinion. As I mentioned before I had trouble really picking out any sort of moral to the story or purpose for reading the book. It felt a lot like a first draft of a story. A good start, interesting plot lines, but needs some major work.
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Moving! 