Review | The Different Girl

The Different Girl by Gordon Dahlquist
Review by Jessica
February 2013 by Dutton Juvenile
240 pages
Amazon + Good Reads
3/5 stars

"Four nearly identical girls on a desert island. An unexpected new arrival. A gently warped near future where nothing is quite as it seems.

Veronika. Caroline. Isobel. Eleanor. One blond, one brunette, one redhead, one with hair black as tar. Four otherwise identical girls who spend their days in sync, tasked to learn. But when May, a very different kind of girl—the lone survivor of a recent shipwreck—suddenly and mysteriously arrives on the island, an unsettling mirror is about to be held up to the life the girls have never before questioned.

Sly and unsettling, Gordon Dahlquist’s timeless and evocative storytelling blurs the lines between contemporary and sci-fi with a story that is sure to linger in readers’ minds long after the final page has been turned."

-Good Reads

The Different Girl was a very interesting read, but ultimately left me wanting more. 

I thought the world building in the book was unique and I really enjoyed reading through the point of view of a robot. Having never read anything about robots, I though the author did a good job of making them interesting and worthwhile to read by making them surprisingly human. Even though that aspect of the story was interesting, I felt that it was the only part of the story that held any interest.

There was not much of a plot and very little events took place. I felt the pacing to be slow and the story to be repetitive. I kept wanting something to happen, but when a big twist did happen, it was still uneventful. The ending of the book as well was a disappointment. Nothing was really explained, and I still had the same questions I had at the beginning of the book. 

Ultimately, it was a nice quick read that I did enjoy, but was left feeling that the author could have done so much more with the story. 

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