Title: The Prep's Diary: How the Prep became so Preppy
Author: Superwicked
Grade: 77% C
Review:
Disclaimer: Excerpts from the story titled above do not belong to me. The one from "The Quimby Hotel" does. That's it this time :P
So, I have a very interesting set of mixed feelings about this story that can pretty much be summed up this way: I do not think it is outstandingly well-written, but I gleaned a great deal of personal enjoyment from it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it makes sense if you think about it—there are extremely high-quality books that I don't enjoy reading simply because they aren't the type of book I like to read, and it only seems fair that there are books I have fun reading despite their numerous shortcomings. It's the reader's equivalent of a harmless, comfy movie that's objectively a bit cheesy and maybe has some shallow writing decisions but the characters are fun to follow and the story overall leaves you with a smile on your face. I find the same appeal in old chick-flicks or Adam Sandler movies.
Because I went through and read the whole book before sitting down to write this review, and because my thoughts are disorganized, I'm going to deviate from my usual method of judging the story chronologically and structure my review based on individual elements of it instead. (I've been listening to a lot of Friendly Space Ninja lately, and he does this, and it feels a lot less chaotic for my jumbled brain.) I'm trying something new, and if it works out, I might use this structure in future reviews as well.
Obviously I'll start with the COVER & DESCRIPTION. My first impressions of The Prep's Diary gave me flashbacks to when I was in middle school and reading Dork Diaries. The cheesy subtitle ("How The Prep Became So Preppy") sets a cute and campy tone that matches the description fairly well. (I am not personally a fan of the title, but I understand what it sets out to achieve.) However, the presentation of the book makes me worry that people are not going to click on it. Having read it, I know that it's a teen chicklit novel heavy on drama, which is quite popular on this site, but from the outside it looks like it's aimed at a much younger demographic than it actually is. In other words: girl. You need to get yourself a better cover, stat.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, because that wouldn't be conducive to your improvement and success. This cover is not good. This book needs something that will make people want to click on it, because Wattpadders are scrolling thoughtlessly and judging everything by eye. The all-caps sans serif slightly off-centered isn't working for me, and it's far too small and rendered kind of unreadable by the artwork in the background anyway. The subtitle being in lowercase would be fine if it was a cute, fun font, but it's just like!!! A generic serif font!! The fact that the illustration of the protagonist isn't centered on this cover also makes it look wonky, and the extra graphic choices feel a bit basic. There are a lot of amazing cover shops around Wattpad, and this is obviously just my opinion, but I think you could really improve your chances of being found by readers if your cover was impressive, colorful, memorable, and fun.
To break down the description properly I'm going to display it here:
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"So, I'm guessing you're just friends, right? Because we all know friends kiss, right?"
Being a teenage girl isn't for the faint of heart. And nobody knows this better than Rosetta Hazel, after seeing her boyfriend, Andrew Thompson and best friend, Mckayla Queens be too friendly and gets thrusted into being a loner for the summer, she meets people that get her while fighting against her past. Will she let the control of her past get to her or will a new prep emerge?
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The description has a very specific problem. For one thing, it's far too short, but the much bigger issue is that it gives off the completely wrong impression of the story. I'll explain. The book's blurb tells readers that the main character catches her boyfriend with her best friend—straightforward enough. But in the story, this doesn't happen until Chapter 13! The way it's presented in the description made me think it would be one of the first major plot points, and I guessed it would occur somewhere between chapters one and four. That would be fairly reasonable. Thirteen chapters is a long time to set up the main event hinted at in the description. If something is mentioned in the description, it should be the catalyst that sets off the rest of the story somewhere towards the beginning. Otherwise, you're just telling everyone your whole plot.
The other line that gives mixed signals is the bit about being thrust into being a loner for the summer. Again, this would make sense if it weren't for the fact that thirteen out of thirty chapters occur during the school year! That's 40% of the book. (Side note: Okay, uhhhh there's no Chapter 10 apparently, and it's not like there's anything missing chronologically the story just skips from 9 to 11 presumably by accident lol. But we'll pretend there's thirty chapters anyway.) Just going off of the description, I went into this story expecting a couple of chapters at the end of the school year and then the rest of the timeline to progress throughout the summer. I won't harp on about this anymore, though, because I'm going to talk about pacing later.
Alright, so let's dive into CHARACTERS.
Obviously, first and foremost we have the main protagonist, a graduating eighth grader named Rosetta Hazel. One thing that this story gets right is how middle schoolers actually act. They're basically short, slightly less mature highschoolers who walk around thinking they're the sh*t. They swear a lot and have ridiculous melodrama, far more, in fact, than their high school counterparts. In middle school every five minutes there's some new couple getting together or breaking up, there's some girls getting into a catfight, or there's some scandal going on schoolwide. In fiction we try to dumb them down and make middle schoolers out to be a lot more tame than they actually are, and even media that is more honest about it tends to be aimed at children (i.e. Diary of a Wimpy Kid) so it obviously has to shave down a lot of the unpleasant jagged edge. The truth is that middle school is a nightmare, it feels like everyone hates you, and the world as you know it is constantly falling apart.
Rosetta Hazel is perhaps the most meek, insecure middle schooler of all time. She's overly sweet, she nods along obediently with whatever her friends are doing, and she's basically always completely clueless to what's going on around her. It's really painful in the beginning to watch her shyly attempt to voice her opinions and stumble over herself trying to apologize for absolutely nothing. To some extent this character is slightly irritating, mostly because you just want to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her and scream at her to get ahold of herself. But I can't get all that annoyed, because I've met people with this type of personality, and they're really sweet and usually just trying their best. You really want to root for Rosetta from the get-go, because it's obvious that she's being manipulated by her friends because she's so gullible. As much as I hate to say it—we readers love to talk down on shy, insecure female characters—Rosetta is about as realistic as it gets. Yes, a lot of middle schoolers are loud, outspoken, and immature, but there are nearly as many of the bumbling incarnations of low self-esteem, especially in girls.
The Prep's Diary is effectively a character study on Rosetta Hazel, so there's a lot of focus on her growth and change as a character. In the beginning of the story she says lines like this:
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Sometimes I feel like I'm not cool enough for Mckayla, Tracey, and Chase, but maybe it's nothing, but God they're so cool and I'm not! I'm glad I'm their friend, but I wish I could be cooler, but I don't know. Maybe I'll never be.
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And by the end...
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"No, I'm done with you pushing me around, something that you'd been doing ever since we were kids, my whole life, I'd been letting you push me around, walk all over me like a doormat and treat me like shit. You're always trying to blame me for whatever reason because you can't handle the fact that you fucked up."
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So, yeah... that's a pretty drastic contrast! It's a coming-of-age novel, and the focus of the story is definitely on Rosetta and how she grows into herself and her confidence. I can't say that Rosetta is the greatest or most well-written protagonist in all of teen fiction history or anything, but credit where credit is due: she is someone you can get attached to and root for, and she only gets more likable as the story goes on. She's overly enthusiastic at times, and I'm unsure how to feel about this because while it does give her a distinct voice and style of narration, all the exclamation points can sometimes be really annoying. I do wish that the author would tone it down somewhat with the exclamation points because it reealllyyy starts to feel like the cheesy narration in Dork Diaries. Overall, I would say Rose's progression from a shy nobody to a confident future freshman feels natural and I really enjoyed reading it. Given that it's at the core of the novel, it was really crucial that this wasn't botched, and though there could of course always be more depth or more attention to detail taken (as with most character arcs), I think the author did a pretty good job. Rosetta is the best character by a long shot, which is a good thing, because readers will be spending a lot of time with her and her development.
Now onto the side characters. The antagonists are one thing and the protagonist's allies are another. As for the antagonists, we have Mckayla, the story's resident biotch, and Andrew, the cheating douchebag. There are also Mckayla's lackeys, Tracey and Chase, who each get so few lines of dialogue I literally don't know a single thing about them. They exist to function as a Crabbe-Goyle duo, parroting whatever Mckayla says and following her around as her muscle or clapping monkeys whenever she needs backup in a scene. Tracey and Chase are so inconsequential I can hardly even call them characters. They have no personalities to my observation, no defining qualities, and could probably be replaced with cardboard cutouts and have the same effect. I don't like these non-characters at all. I'm of the belief that if a villain has lackeys, they should get their own individual personalities, even if they don't really have time to get fleshed-out arcs (I think that Mean Girls does an excellent job of this). Tracey and Chase are so immensely boring and I really have no idea why they're in the story because they have zero effect on the events of the plot whatsoever.
Mckayla and Andrew, on the other hand, do have personalities, they're just terribly one-note. I can excuse Andrew being one-dimensional because he's in the story to fulfill a specific trope, the overconfident a-hole. He's lazy, uncaring, arrogant, and a player. This type of person absolutely exists in real life, and he serves his purpose within the narrative, so he's fine. Mckayla I do sort of have a problem with. Even in the beginning of the story when she's supposed to be Rosetta's "best friend", she very obviously doesn't care about Rosetta, and her manipulation tactics kind of fall flat because it feels like she isn't really trying. Rose only falls for them because she's so hopelessly insecure and seeking validation from the people around her—anyone with even a teaspoon of confidence in their body would see through Mckayla's garbage within five minutes. It's like the writer is aware that the readers already know she's going to turn out to be a backstabbing ex-friend, so there is very little effort put into making her seem genuine in the beginning.
I think it makes her less effective. I would have loved to see a Mckayla who's magnetic, who's good at getting Rosetta to do everything for her because she's charismatic and extraordinarily cunning. To see her act like a best friend in the very beginning, with seeds of doubt planted here and there to make the readers and the protagonist suspicious, would both be more entertaining and make Rose look less unintelligent as a character. When all the readers are begging the main character to see reason, that's a problem with the writing. Mckayla works much better later on, but even then I think I would prefer to see her as a more well-rounded character, particularly because she's obviously going to remain the antagonist in future installments of the series. Giving her charisma and flashes of likability, so that sometimes the readers have to go, "Oh wow, I really can't tell who'll win this battle of wits," would make her more interesting, but that's just not there. Mckayla v.s. Rosetta is very black and white: Mckayla is always evil and Rosetta is always good. It eliminates nuance, which is a waste.
The other side characters include Rose's band of friends (Casiah, Connie, and Fontana), and her mother and two sisters. All three of the friends are quite likable, although Fontana in particular has a stand-out personality. I mix up Casiah and Connie often, partially because their names look similar but also because they just don't take the spotlight of every scene they're in like Fontana does. I wish the girls had gotten more pagetime. I love their presence, and they certainly have an uncanny ability to brighten up any scene, but they're introduced so late in the story that it leaves me wanting more. They don't have time for any development or much of any kind of arc, so at the end of the day, all the side characters just exist as tools to propel the story forward—they surround and support Rosetta's story, but they never have their own individual storylines. I guess that there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it would certainly make the book more interesting if the side characters got enough time to undergo their own arcs in some way. The mother and the sister are entirely insignificant; they're really just extras, but I don't mind them. There are some scenes with the mother that contribute to big emotional moments for Rose, so all good there.
Alrighty, it's time to talk about PLOT.
The plot of The Prep's Diary isn't really anything especially unique, but the character study aspect makes up for it. The basic premise is as follows: Naïve fourteen-year-old (or thirteen, I don't know, I'm guessing) thinks that she has it all figured out surrounded by friends that are way cooler than she is and a boyfriend she doesn't believe she's good enough for, until she finds out that her so-called best friend is actually going out with her boyfriend and no one cares about her and everything sucks. What follows is a brief bout of break-up depression, a bunch of catfights, new friends, and finding herself and discovering a fresh sense of self-worth. It's cute, and it has a fair balance of wholesome moments and over-the-top teenage melodrama. There's nothing particularly original or new being brought to the table, but that's okay—it's teen fiction and there doesn't really need to be.
The big issue I had with the plot of this story was its pacing; it's terribly clunky. Some things drag out for ages and others happen terribly quickly. There was absolutely no reason for it to take Rosetta so long to realize that her boyfriend was cheating on her, and the progression from her initial realization that something is off to the final blow-up between her and her boyfriend and friends is painfully slow. While reading this I was literally screaming inside begging Rose to stop being an idiot so that it would end. I really wanted to get to the fun summer part! Unfortunately, summer takes up less than two-thirds of the story's pagetime, and it mostly consists of going back and forth from the mall to her house to the park, running into Mackayla and Andrew the entire time. Seriously, there are so few settings in this story and so many convenient run-ins with the antagonists that it could be a Disney channel movie. Actually, that's precisely what it feels like at times.
You see, there are no time skips in The Prep's Diary. The timeline of the book goes day by day—each chapter is one new diary entry, and there is a diary entry for every single day of the month. Basically, a day has to progress with every chapter, and I think it really weighs down on the pacing problems of the story. Most books don't do this. When I write, I might write several chapters that all occur in the same day, and then have to do a time skip past an entire week because the events that occurred during that week were not significant to the plot and are better off skimmed over. I don't really know if there's rules to this, I just do what feels natural to the storyline's progression. This book is unique in that it forces every single day to matter, but... not unique in a good way. It's the reason why some sections of the story move at a snail's pace and others feel like they're over a little too quickly. Sometimes a day needs to be stretched, and sometimes a week needs to be compressed! It would be totally okay for Rosetta's entries to skip around with dates.
Other than that, I can't really say a lot about the plot. It's mostly character-focused drama, with the sort of back-and-forth between two girls that you'd expect from teen fiction. There are subplots that contribute less to the conflict between Mckayla and Rose and more to Rose's personal character growth, which I can honestly say I really enjoyed. Both elements are necessary to keep this sort of story engaging, and I understand that, but I tend to appreciate character-building in particular, and the drama in this story doesn't do that very well, especially in comparison to scenes where Rose is making friends or getting a new hairdo. Unfortunately, even though I like the hair subplot, it does go on for far too long, so again, the major plot issues are really just pacing issues. The only other 'problem' with the plot is that the catfights can be cartoonish at times, which can be tied back to what I said earlier in the characters section, and that when drama takes the spotlight, character development is kind of lacking and everyone becomes a bit two-dimensional.
✨ Ginger's silly little bits of advice ✨ When it comes to well-written interpersonal drama, the chick-flick classics are masterclasses for teen fiction writers—iconic films like Mean Girls, Clueless, or She's The Man are the types of movies that just always manage to get it right when it comes to both being subtle and delightfully cheesy. While we mostly regard them as fun but ridiculous white-girl movies, these films became icons of pop culture not just because of the over-the-top fashion but because there is something about them that copycats just fail to replicate; they knew something about how to write the perfect teen drama that many modern teen dramas just seem to miss entirely. Are they filled with unnecessary melodrama and ridiculously theatrical characters? Absolutely, but you don't see modern movies and shows for teenage girls managing their star power despite utilizing similar formulas. I'm of the opinion that we novel writers can learn a lot from screenwriters—that is, from watching movies—and if I wanted to craft a really good chicklit novel, I would watch as many of these movies as I could to identify the patterns that are being used. I can't really tell you the difference between well- and poorly-written drama, because that's not my area of experience, but I certainly know when I see it.
Anyway, I'm not going to sit here and detail the whole plot for you, because given the nature of teen drama plotlines, which are more about characters than anything else, that would be a waste of my time. If you're curious you can just read it. Lol.
Next up is WRITING STYLE. I don't hate the writing style, but I don't love it or anything. I certainly can't say it doesn't have personality. Rosetta's voice comes through loud and clear, which is absolutely a good thing, but it gets slightly annoying to read because the sheer number of exclamation marks is enough to give me an aneurysm. The formatting has a DISASTROUS case of Royal Surprise Syndrome, and by that I mean all the paragraphs are centered. This style of formatting makes me want to dive headfirst into a mountain of bricks, but I will admit that I kinda forgot about it after a while because unlike with A Royal Surprise, the story was entertaining enough to distract me.
There are also grammar issues, and a fair number of them, but while it's pretty bad, it's just the right amount for you to be able to peacefully ignore it while reading. It's not unreadable. Much more egregious is the lack of prose around the dialogue that makes each paragraph extremely short. Coming from a wordy person, this is a nitpick, but The Prep's Diary is extremely dialogue-heavy and tends to forget to fill in the space around all the talking. There are some narration paragraphs with just straight prose, but as previously stated, they are quite short. I could say that Rosetta is a straight-and-to-the-point narrator, but it's more likely that the author prefers writing dialogue to writing everything else. The only way to tell, of course, would be to compare two stories written by the same author, but Superwicked currently has only the one.
In first-person, the prose really depends on how the POV character talks, even though you can obviously take some artistic liberties when it comes to vocabulary or description. Because of this, the narration in MOATD looks a lot different than my usual narration in a fairly obvious way. This even tends to happen in third-person stories; The Dead Zone really doesn't sound anything like Class Freak because while I do switch around focus characters in scenes occasionally, the main protagonists of these two stories who get the most dedicated narration are polar opposites (a clever, decisive pessimist and a clueless, overly friendly optimist respectively). In The Prep's Diary, Rosetta's personal voice is peppy, generally optimistic, insecure, apologetic, and above all, enthusiastic. But I definitely didn't miss all the aspects of the narration that reflect the author's flaws, such as being heavy on exclamation marks and light on contextual prose. I certainly believe it's possible to preserve Rosetta's character while still making the writing style more toned-down and potentially more interesting to read. The character study of Rosetta Hazel provides an opportunity for the author to explore her psyche and her personal growth as the story progresses, but while what is present is pleasant to read, there is a lot left to be desired.
There's a very straightforward, direct approach to Rosetta's character exploration that doesn't leave room for a lot of subtlety. She sort of just says exactly what she's thinking to the reader, and that's okay for some small character moments alone, but she essentially is always like this, and so it tends to cross the show-don't-tell rule. I'm going to do a very short scene comparison with two scenes that I tried to make as similar as possible—one from The Prep's Diary and one from my own story that serves as a character study, which is called The Quimby Hotel.
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Andrew's sweet smile only stabs me with cruel bitterness. I suppose it makes sense why he choose Mackayla over me, she's cool and I'm not. End of story.
I slammed my computer shut in frustration and threw a pillow on the ground. It wasn't fair, I know it wasn't, but that still didn't matter because I was the loser in this. A big fat, loser!
I laid down on my bed, staring at the ceiling, how could it be possible that my whole entire life ends up in shambles by one tick of father time?
A few days before I was on top of the world, nothing could stop me! But now? My self -esteem was lower than hell itself.
Even though it killed me inside, Mckayla gets a 10/10 on the "perfect" girlfriend scale, so I hope getting with Andrew was worth totally destroying our friendship over, but I'm sure it doesn't matter. Well, that's what I've been telling myself lately.
Maybe I shouldn't be so shocked that everything can be in disarray so fast, If the Roman empire can be destroyed by a single wooden horse, what makes me safe from disaster? I sighed again, I picked up my headphones and found the saddest song I could find while scrolling through Instagram, envying all of the cute pics of every single couple ever.
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So this scene from The Prep's Diary leaves pretty much nothing to the imagination. Rosetta is upset over her breakup, and she tells us as much directly, vocalizing her internalized insecurities and generally lamenting her temporarily depressed mental state. That's basically the entire scene, but what I noticed about the writing style is that it's somewhat repetitive. It doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know about Rosetta, and it doesn't do much more than a shallow dive into her thoughts. There's not a lot of meaningful insight that goes past the general 'being sad about a breakup' thing. I'm going to put this next to the closest scene I could find from my own story, in that it provides a private moment for the protagonist alone to reflect on his thoughts. It also entails allusions to a past lover, so I thought it was the best fit for comparison I could manage.
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Hot water poured over his head and cascaded down his shoulders, cleansing him of the grime and blood that had accumulated over the last days since he had had the gift of a fresh shower. There was something holy about it, something that allowed him to forget just for a short time just how unclean he really was. For a blissful moment he could pretend there was no such thing as magic, pretend he was only soft brown skin and the warm blood pumping through his veins—only human.
It was a breathtaking, captivating lie.
Cairo languished in the lie, scrubbed dirt from underneath his fingernails, closed his eyes and tore through his hair, wet curls sticking to his forehead as he cleared his mind of the events of the day. The sound of rushing water drowned out his tumultuous thoughts, leaving behind a relief that, while short-lived, he was immensely grateful for.
Until he started to see flashes of her.
The way she tossed her hair, the way her eyes had sparkled when she laughed, the way she'd whispered to him can you keep a secret and he would've said yes to anything she wanted. He'd successfully warded off all stray thoughts of her for years now, at least three, and he didn't even hear her voice in his dreams anymore. But now. But now.
Cairo shut the water off with a trembling hand. He should never have come back. If this was what he was going to get for returning home, these excruciating memories of her resurfacing, he was better off back in Tukwila. He would've been better off dead.
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The major difference between these two scenes is probably obvious: the second scene doesn't tell you everything. It focuses on sensory elements and their abstract connections to the protagonist's emotions, and even though Cairo alludes to plenty of things that he's thinking, he doesn't outright say things like I miss my old girlfriend, but I block out all thoughts of her to keep myself emotionally shielded from the effects of grief. Most people don't really understand their emotions enough to clearly decipher and articulate them, so it makes more sense for a character to comment vaguely on an abstract interpretation of their feelings than to explicitly spell out each and every feeling and what's behind it. Rosetta's narration doesn't allow for a lot of nuance or interpretation that is left up to the reader to ponder. We kind of just watch her exact thought process play out, which isn't nearly as exciting.
SETTING. The setting of this story is presumably the upper-class suburbs, given the vague description of where Rosetta lives and the clue that she has a maid working in the house. Some of the characters, like Mckayla for example, talk and act, like... sort of trashy for this location? But I won't linger on that too long. My gripe with this is that, as one commenter humorously pointed out, the entire town seems to apparently be one mile long (credit to AshGibbs for that observation). Every single chapter Rose is running into the same exact people, and it starts to get so ridiculous that it's kind of funny. She goes to the mall? Mckayla and Andrew are there. She goes to a café? Andrew is there. She sets one foot outside her house? YOU GUESSED IT! MCKAYLA IS THERE, AGAIN! She's constantly just conveniently running into people that the plot needs her to for the sake of conflict, and it's so contrived that it starts to feel like a running joke after a while.
The setting of this story gives me a Disney-channel-ish or sitcom sort of vibe—allow me to explain. Picture this. You are a producer on a cheap sitcom, let's say on a channel for kids, so it's going to be focused around teenagers. Because your budget is kinda pathetic, you have to choose approximately six locations the characters are allowed to go to throughout the season, since that's all the sets you can afford. You pick all the essentials. One set for the main character's bedroom, one for the living room/kitchen area, one set for the school cafeteria, exactly one classroom, the park, and one for the fountain at the mall where the main cast all hangs out. Bam! You've got yourself a teen sitcom. Now all you have to do is move the characters back and forth between these sets and structure your plot around them. Okay, NOW imagine that this is a book instead. You can literally write your characters to go wherever you want because you are not constrained by a set design budget. So it would be quite silly to treat it like a sitcom, because then you would have to constantly come up with reasons for the characters to be in the same places over and over... right?
I don't know if this is a me problem or I'm onto something legitimate here, but the characters in this story spend their entire summer at the mall. The only locations Rose ever goes are 1) school, in the first elevenish chapters, 2) the mall, omg she spends so much freaking time at the mall, 3) the park, and 4) her house. She also goes to a café once so that she can conveniently witness Andrew cheating on Mckayla. Why is she so boring? Isn't she going to run out of money to spend at the mall eventually? Can't she think of anywhere else to go during the summer? I was kinda expecting, like... the beach or a waterpark maybe, some kind of pool party, the roller rink, something summer-y, I guess? But she is literally at the mall every other day and she shops, that's it, that's what she does for fun lmao. This might be a skill issue because I'm poor but I can't wrap my head around this. She even says in Chapter 29:
Girl I'm crying go get some exercise or something!!!
Anyway, that aside, the plot consistently elects to provide zero explanation for why the setting is so small that every single person in it knows each other, or alternatively, Rose happens to attend all the same locations as everybody she knows. It would be acceptable if this were a tiny rural town in, I don't know, North Dakota or somewhere where nobody lives, but given that it's supposed to be a rich-kids area I'm just kinda left wondering where all the rich kids are. Other than this, we aren't really given a lot about the setting, although the mall gets plenty of pagetime, so by now I've come up with a pretty solid picture of it in my head. The setting in this type of story isn't really that important, so I can't fault it too harshly for failing to give lavish, nine-page descriptions of the forest or something. I suppose my only grievance is that because of the way the same places and the same characters are presented repetitively, it feels less like a setting and more like a set.
THEMES. The themes of this story revolve around self-worth, self-image, and surrounding yourself with people who lift you up and add something meaningful to your life. It's nice, and at times the story is truly heartwarming. I don't usually comment while reading books for reviews, because I'm writing several pages about your story already and don't have that kind of time and energy, but you know what? There were a few times when I was so emotionally invested in the character of Rose and her journey that I couldn't help myself and posted a comment. It just had that kind of effect on me, I can't really explain it. And I think that's a good thing.
I don't know whether race is really an intentional theme in this book or not, but there are some allusions to race, and I like that it's not super in-your-face or anything like that. Race is only brought up as it contributes to the character's storyline of personal growth and accepting herself, as becoming confident in her natural hair is a significant milestone in her development. I like the way it's done! I already complained sufficiently about the pacing, but as far as the themes go, it utilizes 'race' as a thematic element in a way that feels natural and not forced or performative, like some people complain has happened a lot in television in recent years.
Other than that, there is obviously the whole plot of getting over her ex-boyfriend and letting go of the part of herself that allowed everyone else to define her, and there's really nothing negative to say here! The timeline of her post-breakup grief was like, the one part of the story that was paced surprisingly well, actually. I especially love the fact that she doesn't immediately move onto a new and improved Hot Guy 2.0™, and in fact, she does not have a second love interest throughout the duration of the entire story! It's refreshing to see a teen girl who can find her self-worth with the help of her friends and her mom and doesn't have to depend on a boy to tell her that she's beautiful. I really really loved this ❤️
The backstabbing relationship between the protagonist and antagonist was often cheesy and obviously a negative portrayal of female friendships, but there were plenty of other examples of positive relationships between women and girls that really drove a positive message home. Overall, a hopeful tone was certainly achieved here.
CONCLUSION. So, now that I've finally gotten out all the things I don't like about it, I have to admit that somehow I had a lot of fun reading this story. No, I didn't read it all in one sitting, but I was always interested in what was going to happen next, and I was rooting for Rosetta all the way through. I think that it could be written a lot better, but I'm assuming it's a first draft, and that's usually how these things go. If the author were to rewrite it, I would suggest improvements in the characterization and pacing departments especially. I also think there was a lot of summer fun left unexplored that could have made for cathartic moments along Rose's journey of personal growth, and that her friends (and possibly her sisters...?) could have had a larger role if this was the case. A lot of points were also docked for poor grammar and underwhelming prose; there were some times where the dialogue got kinda :/ although I think the dialogue would kinda be automatically improved with better depth-of-character. A few lines were really cheesy or kind of cringe. It's chicklit. It's about what I expected. I was pleasantly surprised by some things and disappointed-but-not-surprised by others.
However, you get an 8/10 on the personal enjoyment scale from me. I couldn't look away from the drama, eagerly awaiting the next time Rosetta randomly ran into someone she knew so that they could have a confrontation. I don't even read this genre, but I don't know. I had a good time. Thanks for your request, and I hope something I said helps in some way!
To anyone reading, thank you for your time, and have a good one.