Book Review - The Orchard, A Memoir by Theresa Weir

The Orchard: A Memoir by Theresa Weir

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I requested this book for review with a number of YA books, and so when it came to me, I began reading it expecting that genre. It's not.


The Orchard is (as the title suggests) a memoir, telling the story of a country girl with a rough past building an unlikely life. It reads like a novel, which is in its favor, though I wondered sometimes how fictionalized a variety of scenes may have been. I guess that's probably true of any memoir. You have to flesh out the skeleton of memory to make it more interesting.



I found The Orchard to be mildly interesting, but not particularly compelling. It starts slow, but does build steam and eventually come to the point where you want to know what is going to happen, whether the protagonists will break away from the prison of sorts that has been fashioned for them.

The thing about this book is that I feel like I should have enjoyed it more than I did. I really relate to the protagonist in many ways, and yet I felt detached from her (I don't think she ever mentions her own name in this book, not even in dialogue). Her decisions often made little sense to me, and I found myself often rolling my eyes or saying, "I told you so."

I don't feel as though I wasted the hours of my life I spent reading this book, but it wasn't anything particularly special, either.

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