Hi friends, happy Friday! Happy end of the week, I hope you’re all well; today I’m going to be posting my review of Melanie Fishbane’s novel Maud.

Maud by: Melanie J. Fishbane: Maud is just a young girl with a dream and a passion to become a writer. That is easier said than done; when living with her grandparents, her grandfather doesn’t believe in women having an education; when she goes off to live with her father, her step-mother has other plans for her other than attending school. But through it all, Maud never gives up hope of chasing her dream. This novel was a good coming of age story of a young girl who just wanted to become a writer. The story was good but the pacing of the novel was really slow and at times made reading this a bit of a slog; it also didn’t help that this lacked a bit of a plot. The reader got that this was to show Maud’s teenage years, but there were times when we didn’t know where the plot was going to go and we were just reading days of her life in what felt like no direction. Aside from that, what the reader really liked and really appreciated was that the author didn’t shy away from erasing parts of history; she included how women were treated, she included that Indigenous people existed and touched on how they were treated as well. It was infuriating to read at times, but depicted real life at that time. The characters were really fleshed out and well developed. The reader liked Maud and her perseverance to become a writer no matter the many, many obstacles that came her way. All of the people in her life, the reader either really liked or really hated. Fishbane wrote these characters with such strong personalities that they provoked intense emotions within the reader. Everything in this novel is based around true facts and the real author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Fishbane did a good job of merging truth with fiction to bring this story to life. It wasn’t the greatest, but the reader still enjoyed the story.