Viola in Reel Life by Adriana Trigiani + Contest!

Pub date - September 1, 2009.

Three reasons why Viola Chesterton knows she'll never survive her first year at boarding school.

• She has to leave behind her best friend, Andrew.
• . . . and replace him with three new roommates who, disturbingly, actually seem to like it there.
• "There" is South Bend, Indiana, which feels about as far away from her hometown of Brooklyn, New York, as you can get. (book back blurb)
  

This book gets ten points alone for not being Tall Tales of the Moron Girls and How to Talk Like a Douche. There was literally a sigh of relief as I started reading this because it wasn't stuffed sausage-tight with so-hip-you-need-a-new-one slang and absolutely ridiculous situations.

But . . .

I started getting antsy, anxious, for something to happen. It was so boring and . . . ordinary. I can understand the realistic aspect to it and trying to make that kind of connection to readers that this could very well be a real girl anywhere having to adjust in a situation like this. But just think about it. How exciting is your normal, everyday girl going to school? Exactly. That's what Viola is.

The book is about the year in Viola's life where she goes to boarding school and has to adjust and learn a few life lessons. The thing is, it's so realistic it makes for a really dull read.

There's no drama. Well, next to none. And I felt that by the end of the book I should be holding hands with someone and singing Kumbaya or something. It was just so Brady Bunch uneventful. Hell, I think the Brady Bunch were more exciting. I mean, for a girl that's pretty much a loner and isn't the nicest of people to her roommates the first day of school, they sure seem to forgive her really quickly and they all become the bestest of friends. There's no head-butting with other girls, no rivalry, no normal social situations that real normal girls go through in school. It's like these characters existed in a love-in vacuum.

There's a hint of intrigue in the story but it pretty much stays that way. A hint. It leads Viola down this road to making her movie but it's just like seeing something in the right time and place. The only excitement going on around you when something like that happens is the epiphany going off inside your head. The only one that cared was Viola. And her Partridge Family friends.

The situation with Andrew was . . . meh. It worked itself out in the end. He joined in the Kumbaya sing-along. Jared on the other hand . . . well, it was another lesson Viola learned. Next time can we make these lessons something resembling compelling, please? Being steeped in ordinary is so BORING. I mean, they were good lessons and all but it was trying so hard to be realistic it ended up not being realistic. Does that make sense? No one goes through their freshman year in high school that easily, even with the "issues" Viola had. NO ONE.

That's not to say a book needs fantastical elements or ridiculous mememe drama for it to be compelling. But the lives of ordinary people are boring and shouldn't be written about. They need spice. This book would have been better with a modicum of tension and drama that actually exists in real school situations but it was so strawberries and cream glossed over that it eradicated it. It's like The Babysitters' Club on Prozac or something. Full House had more tension than this book.

The writing itself was a little awkward too. I know this is an ARC but a couple of things stood out that my gut tells me aren't things that are going to be fashioned out on the last copy edit. Namely dialogue and infodumping.

I have a feeling that dialogue isn't this author's strong point. They were all very stilted conversations and none of the characters really had their own voices. When one said a line, it could have been interchanged with any other character and it wouldn't have made a difference. I mean, not all teens talk like tools but most do use contractions.

And I really shouldn't say infodumping because that implies massive chunks of exposition which there aren't. What I'm talking about are things like conversations, or emails, between two characters where they would say things that are very obviously for the sake of the reader and not for each other. It comes off very unnatural. For instance, Cailtin, one of Violet's best friends from Brooklyn, sends Violet an email. In it she mentions her aunt. Seeing how often Caitlin talks about this woman, and how long they've been friends, Violet should already know who she is. But she goes into small detail about her aunt, "you know, first name, last name, what she does, why she's being mentioned." It's very awkward and very obvious that that information isn't there for Violet's benefit. She'd already know it.

And it really annoyed me when Violet kept saying South Bend, Indiana, South Bend, Indiana, South Bend, Indiana. The full city and state. Constantly. No just South Bend. And no just Brooklyn either. Rarely. Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn, New York, Brooklyn, New York. When you say Brooklyn, who the hell won't know what you're talking about? And what irked me even more, and this is something so minute but it goes against the grain of the character, Violet rarely called Brooklyn home. For how much she missed it, it was always Brooklyn, never home. That bothered me. A lot.

So I went from one extreme, Alphas, to another. It's not a bad book. It's just uneventful, which can equate to boring. Just think about how much you'd want to read the diary of your normal, everyday girl. Then again, I'm pretty sure your normal, everyday girl goes through normal everyday high school shenanigans which seem to be left out of Prefect Academy in South Bend, Indiana. Check your normal high school/boarding school at the door and welcome to Stepford.

Personally, when I read a book, I want something that's going to excite me, in one way or another. Not a boring girl's journal.

And what the deuce is with the boarding school craze? I don't get it. I live within ten minutes of two prestigious girls' boarding schools and every time I passed them when I was younger, I cringed. Now they're supposed to be appealing and real world "fantasy"? Stumped me.

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