Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2020-a book written by an author with flora or fauna in their name.

I didn't know much about Roanoke except that everyone disappeared. The author presents compelling evidence as to where they disappeared and as to why it happened. It is completely fascinating.

This is a subject I've been interested in for such a long time but this book is so poorly written, I am sad to say I can't even bring myself to finish reading it. This has never happened in my entire life; I've never met a book I couldn't muddle through, but this one has bested me. The author's interspersing of source material in italics in the middle of a sentence was so frustrating, not to mention the fact that the author's own interpretation of said material is sometimes confusing as to how the conclusion was even reached in the first place. I don't know how this book made it past an editor. While the subject itself is interesting and the author seems to have done the research, it's so difficult to get past sentence fragment upon sentence fragment. Too bad really, I was looking forward to this one.

Atrociously written, nigh unreadable. I really wanted this to be a great book — the lost colony of Roanoke is so interesting. But I couldn’t make it past the first chapter. Sentence fragments. Littering the text. Breathlessly. Rhetorical questions? Why not? If I were still teaching writing, I’d use an excerpt from this book to show how you can break the rules, very occasionally, for effect — but overdoing it just makes the text amateurish and unreadable.

I don’t believe in persevering through painful books that I’m only reading for pleasure. Stopped reading.

I give this 3.5 out of 4 stars. I would have given it more, but it reads like an essay and because of that I couldn't get into it and really connect with any characters. Still, it was interesting to hear her theory and it does make sense. Is this what happened? Who knows, but it does make you think. I would recommend this to anyone that enjoys American history or mysteries.

This is a very odd & oddly funny history about the disappearance of a group of over 100 settlers on the North Carolina island of Roanoke in 1587. I wanted to read it because I love real-life historical mysteries. I would have gotten more out of it if it were not so badly written. Miller takes elements of a cliffhanger murder mystery, a history of Elizabethan political favoritism, and an anthropological examination of Native American languages, & tries to make a coherent book out of it. To top it off, she decided the mystery would be more mysterious if she didn't write about events in chronological order! Mysterious indeed! I think this is an interesting story & I was intrigued by what I learned about the Native American tribes. But the unintentionally hilarious style made it impossible for me to take it seriously! "Their forsaken condition means only one thing...SABOTAGE." (Cue dramatic music.) "Could there be more to this story?" Miller asks. "How on earth did this happen?" she writes. "I don't KNOW!" Marigold replies. Let me turn the page and find out! And my favorite Miller-ism - "The time has come. We must face the horror." Really, I almost fell off my chair laughing! (And my friends don't know why I find history so frequently hilarious!)

This is the strangest history book I've ever read, in its set up. This book attempts to solve the mystery of the Lost Colony by approaching the subject like a murder mystery which needs to be solved. I was skeptical at first, but I think that it works and helps to keep the book grounded for those of less historically inclined but interested in the topic. Would I have continued to read the book if it weren't about Roanoke and the Lost Colony, I'm not sure.

But as it is, Miller treks back through history before the Lost Colony and after, implicating several big wigs in English history, and makes a solid, more logical case than any other that I've heard.

A historical detective story that does a good job of explaining the politics that probably doomed the Roanoke settlement.

The other reviews are right. This is such a fascinating subject that it deserves a better treatment than this. The writing is absolutely horrid. This wouldn't get a passing grade in Miss Nash's 7th grade English class. How it ever came to be published is a mystery.