Review: Unfiltered

Unfiltered by Leigh Lennon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I will be completely honest – when I started Unfiltered, I was a wee bit nervous. It was an interesting story, but it did not grab me in the way I had initially hoped it would. It was a three-star rating, possibly a three-point-five-star rating, but once we got deeper into the story I found myself being won over.

In fact, the later parts of the book shocked me.

The main reason this book is a solid four-star rating is due to the events that occurred towards the end of the book. There is such an unexpected twist, such an emotional twist, which I was not expecting in the least. It broke me, the way the event came so out of left field – yet it so accurately reflected real life. It was brutal, but it was realistic.

In so many ways, this book is so much more than a simple romance. There is a romance element throughout the book, the couple we follow do fall in love, but there is so much more to experience. There are so many heavy emotions to deal with throughout, related to many different elements of the book. It is not a book for the faint of heart, as it really is an extremely heavy read – however, if you’re willing to take the leap into a heavy book this one is seriously worth it.

If I’m being completely truthful, although this book is labelled a romance, the romance was my least favourite part. In my opinion, things happened much too fast. Even with the characters acknowledging such a fact, I found myself feeling overwhelmed by how quickly the romance progressed. This is a bit of personal preference, though. I favour slow burn romances, and this one happened much quicker than I like.

However, the depth of the everyday life won me over. It amazed me how much pure emotion was in this book. We deal with so many topics throughout. Even without the hard hitter at the end of the book, we touch upon so many real life issues. Everything is dealt with wonderfully, each element given attention, with real responses being seen throughout. I loved how real this book was – it wasn’t filled with unnecessary fluff to lighten the load, instead it reflected real life in a specular fashion.

Fear not – the book isn’t heavy on every single page. As I said, it reflects real life wonderfully – this means there is humour to be found within the pages. It is nowhere near the point of rom-com level, but there are certainly a few moments that will leave you chuckling.

I think the only issue I had (once I was sucked in) was with the dialogue. Some of the conversations felt unnatural, stilted. There are references made to the speaking manner of one of the characters, but there were quite a few points where I felt as though the conversations didn’t flow as well as they could have.

Overall, though, I adored this one. It was a seriously heavy read, but it was more than worth it. As soon as I finished Justine’s story, I jumped into Unacquainted – more than willing to work through this series following one eclectic family.

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