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Review: Dealing with Blue by Stacia Leigh

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Dealing with Blue book cover

Dealing with Blue is a sweet YA romance featuring an unlikely partnership between Suzy Blue, a nice girl who might be a tiny bit uptight, and J.J. Radborne, a good guy who’s just been dumped by his long-time girlfriend. They’re really likable and credible characters who both grow (and grow up) through the book. I quite enjoyed the chance to get to know them. I should mention that Stacia is my critique partner so I had the opportunity to see not only the characters grow, but also the book itself. The end result is charming.

Suzy and J.J. have known each other since they were little kids, because they lived next door to each other for years. But when Suzy’s parents split a while back, she moved out to live with her dad. But now he’s been shipped off to a war zone and she’s forced to move back in with her troubled mom. I say “troubled” because she’s a hoarder, and this means things are difficult for Suzy. Personally, I really enjoyed this setup and watching how it all unfolds through the rest of the book. It’s a fairly honest (but not unsympathetic) look at hoarding and the way it touches the lives of people living with it.

J.J.’s life isn’t nearly so difficult, but it’s not all unicorns and rainbows, either. Getting dumped by his girlfriend really sucks. They were together forever and he thinks he really loves her. But he has a plan for this—make her jealous and she’ll want him back. Who better to help with this then his old pal, Suzy? All he has to do is teach her to drive so she can escape. It doesn’t occur to him to wonder why she needs to get away so bad, but it doesn’t matter since theirs will be a mutually beneficial deal.

Watching Suzy and J.J.’s relationship unfold is a lot of fun. It’s sweet and cute but wholly believable. Suzy is terrified of J.J. finding out about her mom’s hoarding, and the whole time I was wondering how J.J. he would react when he finds out (because of course, he has to). The resolution is interesting and satisfying.

Another way that the book provides an unusual perspective is that it feels more like J.J.’s story to me. Usually a romance focuses on the girl’s perspective, so if you like seeing more of the guy’s perspective, you’ll especially like this.

You can buy Dealing with Blue on Amazon US

Review: Carrie Pilby by Caren Lissner

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Carrie Pilby book cover
Carrie Pilby offers an interesting portrait of an unusual girl, one I can sort of relate to, though she’s way smarter and way more well-balanced at her age than I was.

Carrie is 19 and she’s recently graduated with a degree from Harvard because she’s very, very smart. But she’s also become a bit of a hermit. Her only family is her father, and he’s in Europe. He does support her, though, and she has a decent apartment to hide out in. Because that’s what she’s doing. She spends most of her time lounging in bed in her apartment. She’s obviously got low-grade depression (possibly dysthymia) but it seems to come mostly from being isolated.

And why is she isolated? Well, she’s a little socially awkward, it’s true. But the reader can easily see that the real problem is her worldview. She’s very cynical and sees almost everyone around her as hypocrites (sex-obsessed ones at that). She’s fairly judgmental and holds everyone else up to her own high standard. If they’re not as smart as she is, they’re stupid. If they don’t hold themselves to the same moral standards, they’re horrible. And so on.

So in some ways, she’s not the most likable person. But like every good New Yorker, she has a therapist. Hers challenges her to change her life by doing a few smallish things, and she finally relents and gives it a shot. He’s told her to list 10 things she likes, join a group, go on a date, tell someone she cares, and celebrate New Year’s. For most people, this wouldn’t be hard, but it is for Carrie because she has to change her outlook to make it all happen. So the book is suddenly about dismantling her worldview a piece at a time. Not too far into the book, she finally gets a job that makes her interact with other humans and we start to see her walls shrink a little. Her quest to finish the list takes her a lot of unexpected places and we watch her grow and finally learn how to live a little more happily.

Oh, and it’s funny, too. Self-aware social misfits often are.

You can buy Carrie Pilby: A hilarious and charming story on Amazon

Review: Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill

Posted on by kellyvincent

Only Ever Yours book cover

Only Ever Yours is Irish author Louise O’Neill’s first novel and it’s remarkable. You know how some books stay with you, or basically haunt you? This is one of those. She creates an extreme and disturbing dystopian world that is still very credible. Think The Handmaid’s Tale. It messed with my head so much that I had to tell other people about it—I needed to get it off my chest to spread some of the feeling of disturbance around.

I’ll give you a basic setup of the world of the book. Men control virtually everything. Or, they control everything that matters, leaving a few women in charge of controlling the “designed” girls that are brought up entirely to satisfy the all-important men in one way or another. They are test tube babies, basically, and each have a number assigned to them (their model number). Everything they do relates to a specific cohort of young men. Each year, the society designs three times as many girls as there are two-year-old boys. The girls’ roles are determined on their sixteenth birthday, where they will each become a companion (the designated son-breeding machine assigned to one of the cohort), a concubine, or a “teacher” at the center they themselves were raised in.

O’Neill’s main character is called frieda (aka #630) and the book is told entirely from her (very warped) perspective. She’s approaching her sixteenth “design day.” frieda doesn’t know how messed up her world is and O’Neill does a magnificent job of withholding details of that world, letting just enough info leak out to keep you really interested. You know throughout the book that the ending isn’t going to be nice—whatever role she is assigned, it’s terrible. All the girls strive to be companions, but even that has a very disturbing consequence, besides the inherent being-a-slave part. But the ending still surprised me.

The world is so extreme that some might find it hard to buy into. After all, the girls all are basically willing participants in a system they don’t question. But I found it credible because girls and women have a track record of participating in their own subjugation (judging others for not wearing enough makeup or for dressing “slutty”, voting for a man who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, or in more extreme cases, forcing young girls to marry or arranging cliteredectomies… the list goes on).

You can buy Only Ever Yours on Amazon

Review: Beauty Queens by Libba Bray

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Beauty Queens book cover

I read this book over a year ago and it currently still my favorite recent-ish read. It’s absolutely hilarious—I laughed out loud over and over. And it’s also genius. It cleverly highlights the ridiculous expectations society has on teen girls and women in general. The humor focuses on using the absurd and the book plays with stereotypes to great comic effect. Bray manages to create realistic and believable characters using US state stereotypes as the template. Eventually, she turns everything on its head.

In the book, contestants in a teen beauty pageant crash land on a desert island. Only thirteen of them survive, representing a little bit of everything. One Indian-American, one African-American, a Jewish girl, and a bunch of white WASPy girls hailing from states all over the country. Miss Texas—Taylor—is awesome. She takes charge the way a bold Texan should (even making them woo-hoo enthusiastically), making sure to keep up the propriety these girls are used to: “Miss Montana? Is that the way a Miss Teen Dream sits, all slutty like that with her hoo-hoo showing?”

One of the girls spends the duration with an airline serving tray embedded in her forehead. Taylor admonishes her for being upset—“let’s not get all down in the bummer basement where the creepy things live.”

When they’re taking stock of the skills and knowledge they have, Jennifer tells everyone that her family traditions are alcoholism, dysfunction, and “anything you can make from government cheese.”

But my favorite is Adina, Miss New Hampshire, who entered the contest as a joke and is my personal hero. She missed the memo about the societal rule that a respectable girl doesn’t say anything about herself that might be construed as bragging.

I won’t spoil the fun for you, but I have to say when the hot pirates show up, I thought I would die from laughing.

One last thing: I listened to the audiobook, which was one of the best ones I’ve ever listened to. It was narrated by the author herself, and she does different voices for all the characters–often, I find this annoying, but here it totally works (maybe because I trust her to know what she was imagining when she wrote it).

You can buy Beauty Queens on Amazon