The Victoria in My Head

Well, another contemporary YA that I really liked. I feel like I'm making a liar out of myself. Or I've been incredibly lucky. Or YA Fiction is changing.

I'm gonna go with the latter.

The Victoria in My Head is about Victoria, a Cuban-American high school student in New York who's focused on getting into a good school (this feels familiar, right?), but her life is incredibly boring. She can predict everything that happens from the time she wakes up in the morning to dinner in the evening. Nothing ever changes.

But.

There's always a but.

Victoria sees a boy putting up a flyer for band auditions. And the boy is gorgeous,  BUT A BAND! The band is looking for a lead singer, and in a moment of insanity, Victoria believes she can do it.

A brief moment.

Then she realizes not only is it a crazy idea, but her parents would never let her.

But luckily, she has a best friend named Annie who isn't afraid to share a video of Victoria's 11 year old self singing. And the band says, come audition! And despite being completely humiliated that they saw the video, she does.

Aaaand she bombs it. Stage fright. She does ok, but didn't blow anyone away.

I mean...of course she gets in. What story would there be without that? She has to hide it from her parents--pretends she's still in track. They find out, of course. She gets in trouble. Pretends to quit. Oh, and there's a love story. The whole time Victoria is with this one guy, I just wanted to scream at her: HE IS CLEARLY THE WRONG ONE! YOU'RE DOING THIS ALL WRONG! It was a first boyfriend, so of course it was all wrong.

Ultimately, it was a cute story. There was nothing spectacular or life changing about it, but it was a fun read. Probably made more fun by the fact that I didn't expect to like it much. I mean, I don't know anything about music, and that was a big part of the book. Every chapter title had a song name and band, and I didn't recognize even one. I probably would have appreciated the story even more if I had.

The characters are fun. The story is fun. Worth reading if you like contemporary fiction.

Mask of Shadows

I really wanted this book to be amazing, but it fell far short. One of my friends read it before I did and left a 2 star rating goodreads, so I was a little bit prepared for it being bad. But she didn't give much detail as to how it was bad, and now I know.

The reason I wanted this to be good is because it has a gender fluid main character. This is a major breakthrough for a YA Fantasy. I can think of only 2 YA books with gender fluid characters (Symptoms of Being Human [which is amazing--read it] and None of the Above [which I haven't read]), and they're both in Fiction. Fantasy barely has any LGBT representation, much less the main character, and much much less a gender fluid main character. And just FYI, the author refers to Sal as they/them in the book (not as he/she), so that is how I will reference the main character in my review.

So, synopsis: Sal is a thief. A professional thief. They come from a country that has been decimated by something called shadows, which seem to rip people apart when they kill them. Sal is a refugee, someone who escaped the shadows that basically killed an entire people when another kingdom pulled out it's troops when it was supposed to be protecting them.

The book opens with them ambushing a coach with a lady inside. This is the Lady Elise, who ends up being very important to the story. Sal is robbing her, but they are very charming about it. There is clearly instant chemistry between the two. Sal even lets her keep a sentimental gem, even though they would usually take it. But most importantly, Sal finds a flyer for auditions for a new member of the Queen's Left Hand, which is a team of four assassins. They only do auditions when one has died. Sal sees this as an opportunity to rise in the world and get revenge of the people who wronged their country.

The competition is led by the other 3 members of the Queen's Left Hand, who are all identified by a gem: Amethyst, Ruby, and Emerald. The auditioners are auditioning to be Opal. They're numbered one through twenty three and their goal is to kill each other by whatever means possible, but without it being possible to trace it back to them. Not the most original premise, but not bad. Definitely see echoes of the Throne of Glass and Hunger Games series.

So here are some of my problems with the book, in no particular order:

Confusing transitions between scenes--at the start of a scene, it would describe two characters as there, but then a third character would start talking. There were others, but this happened a lot. It made for a lot of rereading. I kept trying to figure out if I had missed something. I hadn't. It was just inattention to detail.

The love interest was rushed. There was some flirting between Sal and Elise, then some tutoring,  but we don't really know who Elise is except she's a wealthy noble. How are we supposed to care about this relationship? We see her like three times and suddenly, Sal is in L-O-V-E. It's almost lile it was thrown in because the author wanted to show a gender fluid person in love. It wasn't enough of a reason for a shoddy romance.

As a matter of fact, none of the characters were very well developed. This was probably my biggest problem with the book. Aside from the fact that we don't know who anyone is--half the cast is wearing masks and identified by number or gems--there was no sense of their personality. So Sal kept noticing things about people, like where they're from based on accent, whether they're nobles, weaknesses and strengths, and filed it away for future reference. It was kind of Sherlocky. But then they never did anything with that information. It was never used! Maybe that was how the author was trying to develop the characters, but it was pointless bits of information that were not integral to the story at all. I kept thinking it was foreshadowing, but it never was. It's too bad because there were so many things that could have been done with that information, especially for a master thief.

There was just so much more info I needed as a reader. These may be problems the author addresses in the rest of the series, but at that point, it's often too late. Who wants to keep reading a series when the first book wasn't very good? I want such diverse books to be successful, but this one didn't do it for me.

Highly Illogical Behavior

I actually met John Corey Whaley a few years ago in some of my early bookseller days. He used to live in the Shreveport area, and he came into the bookstore to do a signing. At that time, only his first book was out. I think it was called Where Things Come Back. I've never read it, but I remember how cool it was to see another book by him come out.

This was available through the library as an audiobook and I decided to take a chance on it. Highly Illogical Behavior follows Lisa, an aspiring psychologist, and Solomon, a severe agoraphobe. Lisa wants to go to college at the school with the second best Psych program in the country. To do that, she needs a scholarship. And to get a scholarship, she needs to write the best essay about her experience with mental health. And she has the perfect topic.

Three years before, a boy had walked out of the school, stripped his clothes off, and laid down in the big water fountain outside the entrance. Lisa never saw him again. She decided to make him the subject of her essay. Better yet, she was going to write how about she helped him. But first, she had to find him. She finds out his mom is a dentist, wrangles an appointment with her, and tells her she used to go to school with her son. That's when she finds out Solomon hasn't left the house in over 3 years.

Lisa goes into the whole project thinking she's going to be objective. She's going to find out what this boy is so afraid of and therapy him through it without him realizing it. But Lisa finds out Solomon is actually pretty cool and really funny. What she doesn't expect is to become his friend. Solomon even eventually meets Clark, Lisa's boyfriend, and the three become inseparable. I loved reading about (listening to) their growing friendship. It was unlike many other teen fiction stories with the backstabbing and secretly hating each other (although there was like, a chapter of this).

Half the story is also told from Solomon's point of view, and he explains that the world is too chaotic. There are too many things outside his control. At home, he can control his environment, and that makes him feel safe. And even though he has panic attacks before, after, and sometimes while Lisa is visiting, he keeps inviting her back, and lets her enter his world. He gets to a point where he does trust Lisa, and she is able to help him through his attacks and he is able to go outside (to the backyard), but that anxiety is still a part of him. It's not something that could just disappear because he suddenly has friends.

One of the things I thought was really well done was how severely flawed Lisa is as a character. Not flawed like Solomon, where he has an actual mental health problem. But flawed in her thinking. She knows her approach-pretending to befriend someone to treat them--is crossing ethical boundaries, but in her head, it's worth it--for Solomon and her future career. Even her boyfriend, Clark, tells her that what she's doing is not ok (he keeps her secret anyway, but he tries to convince her to tell Solomon). I love that this book demonstrates how profoundly wrong Lisa's way of thinking about mental health is--that it's something that can just be fixed. I also love that Solomon wasn't just a token character who shows the reader how Lisa develops. He was his own, fleshed out, well-developed person. I mean, there's no story without him, but sometimes an author makes such a character a stereotype or what they imagine such a person to be, which can come off as demeaning and spreads misinformation. Solomon is just like any other teenager. He just doesn't go outside.

Personally, I have been very lucky in that I've never had anxiety or depression or low self-esteem or any other of a number of problems that so many people struggle with. I have known many who do, though, and I know it's never something that just goes away. It's always something they have to fight, and sometimes they can't do it alone and that's ok. If you're one of those people, I hope you know how strong you are. It takes a lot to fight the kind of battles you do every day. I hope you know you're not alone and that even when things feel hardest, you're valuable. You have something to contribute. You're important. You're wanted. And if anyone tells you otherwise, I'm happy to tell them to go to hell.