after finishing the seventh child a few weeks ago, i needed something that would be fast and easy to get through. not something mindless, necessarily, but just something i could finish in a week rather than a month. enter the unimaginable by dina silver, another kindle first book from last year. i admittedly knew nothing of what it was about when i began reading last week, so i had no idea what to expect.

what i found was an ok book that felt very disjointed and also very predictable.

the main protagonist of the book is the narrator, jessica. hailing from a small town in indiana and with little exposure to the outside world, jessica uproots herself and moves to thailand following the death of her mother. she gets a job teaching at a primary school and begins making a life for herself in a place unlike any she’s ever been to before.

and because jessica obviously needs a mate, we meet grant. he is sailing around the world and happens to cross paths with jessica in phuket. she falls for him almost as soon as they meet, while he is nice but a little standoffish. to be honest, i spent most of their interactions shaking my head, because it felt so incredibly forced. there were a few parts where i actually cringed or groaned out loud.

but because the unimaginable is not just about romance, we also have a run-in with somalian pirates while sailing from sri lanka to oman. the prologue of the book deals with this hostage situation, so i knew it was coming, but it felt like it took forever to finally get there. silver uses a lot of foreshadowing to remind readers that there is some weird evil lurking out there, but it takes a long time to finally get to it.

and then, within one chapter, the hostage situation is taken care of, and we are back to the romance. i guess i expected – or at least hoped for – more of a balance, and it seemed as though silver wanted to concentrate more on the relationship between jessica and grant. either way, it felt extremely strained, and the part i was waiting for from the beginning hardly took me twenty minutes to get through.

above all, i think the two words i would use to describe the unimaginable are cheesy and predictable. as soon as grant was introduced and i learned that he was sailing around the world, i was immediately able to fill in the general way things would progress. there was one big surprise i was not expecting, but otherwise it all pretty much played out how i imagined it would. and i was pretty disappointed with the execution of it all.

i will say this: silver includes an author’s note at the end of the book with some details about how and why she chose this particular subject to write about. it clears up some questions i had about the plot and sequence of events, but it unfortunately did not distract enough from the fact that it just was not that good of a book.

but at least it was fast.

my goodreads rating: 2.0 out of 5. and that is even though it was free.

crossing off the popsugar reading list: a book set in a different country.

next up: i think it’s time for leaves of grass by the captain himself, walt whitman. even on the kindle it has small print, so wish me luck.

happy reading!

xx