Book Review: Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly

Title/ Author:  Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn't Fly by P. T. Jones
Publisher/ Year:  ChiTeen, 2014.
How I Read It:  E-book, courtesy of NetGalley
Why I Read It:  It sounded good & I decided to read it.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5

Summary from Goodreads:  Things Mary doesn’t want to fall into: the river, high school, her mother’s life.
Things Mary does kind of want to fall into: love, the sky.

This is the story of a girl who sees a boy float away one fine day. This is the story of the girl who reaches up for that boy with her hand and with her heart. This is the story of a girl who takes on the army to save a town, who goes toe-to-toe with a mad scientist, who has to fight a plague to save her family. This is the story of a girl who would give anything to get to babysit her baby brother one more time. If she could just find him.

It’s all up in the air for now, though, and falling fast. . . .
Fun, breathlessly exciting, and full of heart, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly is an unforgettable ride.

I'm going to be honest...this book was a huge waste of my time.  I really regret requesting to review it for NetGalley.  There were so many things that disappointed me about this book.  First was the fact that the Goodreads summary really doesn't give the book justice.  I thought this was gonna be a book written beautifully like the way Gayle Forman's writing or Tahereh Mafi's writing is.  The summary is just a tease.  The book, in my opinion, while there were interesting ideas there, it felt poorly written.  I could see the potential, but it just wasn't at all interesting.  From Liv and Mary's texts to each other to the Floating Boy actually literally being called Floating Boy throughout the book (THE BOOK IS LITERALLY THE TITLE).  The summary makes it seem like it's magical or metaphorical.  The book isn't even written in the same style as its summary which is super misleading.  

One of the things that annoys me about this book is that there was no depth to the characters.  It was all plot and no substance.  I didn't relate to any of the characters and actually found them quite annoying.  The only characters that were fairly intriguing were Floating Boy and Mr. Barron, just because they have some sort of back story that contributes to the plot.  That was pretty much the only thing that kept me reading.  And there were certain hints around the book that revealed some of the questions I had, but it wasn't put together that well, considering I was confused for a majority of the book and felt myself skimming just because I was dying to be done.

Given that most of my review is negative, I will admit that it was entertaining and it had great potential to be a good book, but it just didn't appeal to me, and it's not something I would recommend to my friends.