Freckles - Cecelia Ahern

 

Description

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
 
When a stranger utters these words to Allegra Bird, nicknamed Freckles, it turns her highly ordered life upside down. In her current life as a parking warden, she has left her eccentric father and unconventional childhood behind for a bold new life in the city.
 
But a single encounter leads her to ask the question she’s been avoiding for so long:  who are the people who made her the way she is?  And who are the five people who can shape and determine her future? Just as she once joined the freckles on her skin to mirror the constellations in the night sky, she must once again look for connections.

Told in Allegra’s vivid, original voice, moving from Dublin to the fierce Atlantic coast, this is an unforgettable story of human connection, of friendship, and growing into your own skin. 

Five people. Five stars. Freckle to freckle. Star to star.

Review

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The lack of speech marks made it a hard read for me.

Allegra has freckles and she's self harmed to connect them into constellations. At first this is all we know about Allegra. As the book progresses we begin to understand that she is moving to a slightly different beat than everyone else.

She has come from a small island off the coast of Ireland to work as a traffic warden on the mainland but really she always wanted to be in the Garda. It's here she meets someone who tells her that she is the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, and he doesn't mean it as a compliment. At first I couldn't understand why Allegra takes this to heart so much and it dominates most of the first half of the book. I felt it was over played and I struggled to get into the book.

The scenes with her Father where she suspects him of displaying signs of dementia were so well written and believable. I felt sorry for her when she went back to the island and everything she knew had changed. I also felt sorry for her as she tried to connect to five new people.

The second half of the book flowed much better, by now I had the measure of Allegra, well I thought I did. Maybe I misjudged her just as some of the people in the book did. The ending was sweet justice for Allegra.

I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars. My thanks to netgalley for the ARC to review.