It’s taken me almost a month to finish off a physical book. Getting sucked into my old habit of crashing when I get home, listening to podcasts or YouTube videos.
This latest book I finished is a Young Adult Fiction. I chose the book namely because of the author, Jodi Picoult, who is known for some of her other works like My Sister’s Keeper, which has a film adaptation, Small Great Things, House Rules, and Handle With Care among many others. Picoult has a great way of sharing stories through multiple perspectives and the ones that involve medical issues seem to be very heavily researched for accuracy in depicting the ill and those around that are also affected. She also wrote this book with her daughter, Samantha van Leer.
The premise of this book is that a teenage girl fell in love with a storybook character. Like she and the character had full on conversations while he was in the book and it blossomed into a whole love thing. Their love was so strong and so true (insert adult eye roll and deep sigh) that they devised a way to get him out of the book. He stepped into real life and the son of the author of his book went into the story. The chapters follow the same pattern that Picoult uses, sharing each main character’s perspective of the experiences.
Of course, when you first get what you wished for, it’s amazing and you love every moment of it. But somewhere along the line, Delilah (main girl) gets a bit annoyed that her storyboo Oliver has become really popular at her school and she has to actually share him with others.
Insert high school drama type stuff. Insert sick parent and brooding bff, love triangles, first fights and makeups (it was mostly PG-13, no love scenes). High school me would have loved every moment of this book. It’s like a fairytale for teens. It has that element of realness because high school and all of the drama that comes along with that. But there’s that essence of childhood, that a storybook character could come to life. That dreams do come true if you just wish really, really hard. That sometimes the nerdy girl gets the good guy.
In the end, some characters get a happy ending, and some don’t. Love doesn’t always conquer all, and I wished that all the characters could have had a happy ending since she was already taking the story that route.
You will like this book if:
- You’re a teenage girl or young at heart
- You like a little fantasy in your teenage dramas
- You want to know what it would be like for a character of story to
- have the real life human experience.
Life of Neu 