Maria’s Awakening is a wonderful coming of age story about 19-year-old Maria, a freshman at Iowa State University.
The story takes place in 1948 and covers her first semester at the university where she falls in love with two totally different men for totally different reasons. Along the way, she also loses her virginity and begins to question not only her relationship with both men but also what direction she should take her life in.
I honestly have not given anything away as everything I’ve just told you is in the book’s description on Amazon. Unfortunately, that is also about all there is to the story. Which makes rating this book difficult for me.
I loved the story, adored Maria and, for the most part, found the characters believable.
However, two things became annoying very quickly.
First was the unbelievable amount of detail describing Maria’s, and her friend’s, daily routines and activities: So much of which added nothing to the story but did make it a struggle to get through.
Second was the deliberate use of phrases and terms that made everybody seem like country bumpkins and life in Iowa playing catch up with the rest of the world in 1948. I’m sure the author was trying to describe how different life in the mid-west was back then but, for me, she got carried away. That made her characters hard to relate to and a lot of their dialog hard to believe.
So, all and all a very cute, difficult to get through story, without very many twists or turns or things you don’t see coming.