Jun 30 2009
The Will to Win by Patrick Davy, a review
The Will to Win by Patrick Davy is an adult novel, but one would never even think that when reading it because it was just not that great and actually read more like a children’s parable about how bad things can be in life.
The novel is about Bonita Stickle. When we initially meet her, she is a college senior who decides to start searching for a man to marry and begin a family with. She lives with her father, a preacher at the local church and her mother, a missionary. As such, there are many, strict moral rules that she must abide by and religious principles that she must uphold, and certainly any man that she brings home must abide by them as well. She is challenged in upholding her beliefs and behavior in attracting a man as they are often in conflict with how she feels that her religious beliefs dictate that she act. As such, Bonita forces herself to disregard her beliefgs and dresses to attract the man that she hopes will become her child’s father and her life partner.
Soon, her problems start and range from an unplanned pregnancy to feeling the effects of the war in Iraq.
This book was terribly written. The writing was jerky and the chapters didn’t smoothly transition at all. The characters were two dimensional stereotypes whose every actions were predictable. Mr. Davy apparently had a very difficult time trying to write a novel for adults, and this novel was stuck in the child/young adult realm (and wasn’t even good as that!). It was a shame because the issues that Bonita faced could have been powerfully done if Mr. Davy had spent more time on word choice and sentence structure and perhaps made the book longer than it’s 130 pages. The plotlines were also very predictable and I didn’t feel like the characters learned much. They were very two dimensional and, as noted above, predictable in their actions and reactions.
Mr. Davy should stick to writing children’s books.
Book 41/100
