AMERICAN GIRL OF THE YEAR: Blaire

 
The 2019 Girl of the Year was Blaire Wilson. 

Blaire lives on a farm, which supports a bed and breakfast run by her grandfather and a restaurant run by her mother. In the first book, her father is working on renovating the barn into an event space. 

Blaire is a cute character. She feels like a modern girl with her reliance on devices more than past GotYs, but it's not really a bad thing. Just a modern thing. 

Blaire has many "idea-sparks" about cooking, designing, event-planning, you name it. 

The first book has her trying to keep her grandfather from moving. She overhears him tell a friend that he's against the barn event space idea and is considering retiring. Of course he was just talking and it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, but Blaire throws herself into helping plan her favorite farm worker's wedding. The wedding needs to be done quickly so her brother can give her away at the altar before he goes on military leave. 

Blaire naturally gets into some friend drama by ignoring her friend in favor of wedding prep, but to be fair, said friend did volunteer to help with everything and then did basically nothing. I'm not a huge fan of Thea. She seems like another rather selfish BFF character. Thankfully, Blaire's books are loaded with other good characters to make up for Thea's suckiness. 

While the first book is a little stereotypical and fluffy, the second really succeeds. Both are well-written. I like this author's voice a lot. But the second has Blaire getting caught up in too much planning again, though this time it's for her 5th grade community service project. That's the kind of thing you want to overextend yourself on because it's for a great cause. 

No friend drama with the girls this time, but Blaire struggles to befriend a shy, standoffish new boy in her class. 

Blaire's newly-diagnosed as lactose-intolerant and she struggles with this in both books. 

I really enjoyed both of these. They seem very realistic with less once-in-a-lifetime big ideas than some of the past GotYs.