REVIEW! Unwritten by Tara Gilboy

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC for Unwritten by Tara Gilboy. This review will not contain spoilers.

My Rating: ★★★★

So the blurb for this book (taken from Goodreads) is:

Twelve-year-old Gracie Freeman is living a normal life, but she is haunted by the fact that she is actually a character from a story, an unpublished fairy tale she’s never read. When she was a baby, her parents learned that she was supposed to die in the story, and with the help of a magic book, took her out of the story, and into the outside world, where she could be safe.

But Gracie longs to know what the story says about her. Despite her mother’s warnings, Gracie seeks out the story’s author, setting in motion a chain of events that draws herself, her mother, and other former storybook characters back into the forgotten tale. Inside the story, Gracie struggles to navigate the blurred boundary between who she really is and the surprising things the author wrote about her. As the story moves toward its deadly climax, Gracie realizes she’ll have to face a dark truth and figure out her own fairy tale ending.

I loved the idea for this book, I personally would love it if I discovered I actually came from a storybook. This was such an easy read for me and I think that was partly because it's middle grade, but mostly because it was really well written. I loved how Gracie's character was written, Tara perfectly captured an almost-teenager, I especially love when Gracie knows something was her fault but still shifts some of the blame onto someone else - if her mum had just told her about the parchment, she never would have taken it - typical twelve year old. 

I also really liked the little plot twists throughout the book, and also finding out why Gertrude had written the characters in her book the way she did. This was quite a dark story for a middle grade book but I for one would have loved to read more books like this when I was that age. This also works really well as a standalone but if the author decided to turn this into a series, it has been written in a way that both would work. I don't want to include any spoilers so I'll leave you with my favourite line from the book...

"Because what does it mean, really, to be labelled as a villain? No one actually thinks of herself as a villain. We are all the heroes in our own stories."