Reality Check

Ah, early Jen Calonita is not great. This one was written a little after Sleepaway Girls, which I think is the only other non-series book of hers I've reviewed. I really enjoyed Belles and her later work, but you can tell she was finding her footing as an author with these early ones. 

I don't remember much about Sleepaway Girls, but from my review, it seems I liked some of the characters. That's more than I can say for this one. 

Reality Check is about four teens from Long Island. Apparently, they're from the more small beach town side than the richy rich side. Main character Charlie (Charlotte) is working in the small cafe in town when she's discovered by a tourist that turns out to be a reality TV producer. Said producer wants her and her three besties to star in a cute, down to earth reality show about small town life on Long Island. 

Yeah, that won't end badly. 

The girls start fighting almost immediately. Charlie's love interest doesn't want to be on camera. One of the girls pulls away from the others after catching the attention of the rich girl she's always wanted to be like. Then the girls start to realize that they're being manipulated by the execs and forced into dramatic scenes and fake dates. They team up with their producer, who's the underling of the one who discovered them, and mastermind a live show, then use that as a platform to expose how they were treated and how scripted reality is totally fake. 

A quick look at the cast and then we'll be done with this review. 

Charlie: She's a Type A who loves to organize things, but she's also a goody-goody. She's likeable but also pretty bland. Black hair. 

Brooke: She's a farm girl obsessed with people not thinking of her as such. Social climber. Wants designer clothes and gets them at outlets. Wants equal screentime with Charlie and can't stand the fact that Charlie was picked to be the star and she wasn't. Once they're filming, she catches the attention of Marleyna, the Paris Hilton-esque rich girl Brooke has always idolized, even though Marleyna was a bully to her when they were kids. Brooke is a thoroughly unlikeable character and drops her friends in favor of reality TV and how she thinks it can get her away from the farm forever. 

Hallie: The gorgeous boy-crazy one. She's tan and brunette. I feel like they wanted to make her more than just white but didn't. She waitresses at her parents' popular seafood restaurant on the water. She really has zero character aside from this. She's likeable, but you don't get to know much about her. 

Keiran: The blonde. She has younger siblings she's forced to babysit for a lot and the execs want her off the show because they say her life is too boring. She feels like the smart one, except I do think she's a pushover when it comes to her free time. She's making several thousand per episode. Pay for a goddamn babysitter yourself and have some alone time. If your parents are too busy to parent, they shouldn't have had that many kids. I liked her the best of the four, but like Hallie, you don't learn much about her. 

The most likeable character in the book is Zac, Charlie's love interest, who's smart, funny and not interested in fame one single bit. 

Overall, this book isn't good. It's not a total waste of time, but it's not well-written, the characterization is weak, and there are rookie mistakes like putting Hallie in a totally different outfit two pages after she was described wearing something else. The outfit descriptions are unnecessary and don't work as well as they do in series like The Clique, It Girl and Poseur. They're clunky here and they tend to be repetitive. It's not horrible, but I've read a lot better YA girl drama books. The best thing about it is that they used Pullips as the cover models. 

Disney's Twisted Tales: Conceal, Don't Feel

I'm not a big Frozen fan, but there are definitely elements in the story that could have made for a good twisted version. 

However, what we got is so watered-down and weak that it's just as kid-friendly as the movie. Not what the twisted tales line should be about. 

In this book, when they're kids, Elsa messes up the troll's spell. Her powers are locked away and Anna is spelled to be unable to be near her sister. The closer she is physically to Elsa, the faster she freezes. The screwy spell also makes the entire kingdom forget Anna exists, save her parents and the nice couple who are given Anna to raise. (The woman in the couple is the girls' mother's BFF.) So Elsa grows up in a lonely, solitary, studious life, while Anna lives in a small town in the mountains, being the happy, friendly, creative daughter of the town bakers.  

Time passes and Elsa's powers reveal themselves. Her parents leave for their doomed journey. Anna realizes that Freya, the friend of her mom's who visits every couple months, is actually the queen. She and Kristoff journey to Arendelle to help Elsa, because Anna feels she's in danger. Elsa, who has been courted by Hans for a year, flees a few moments before her coronation, after finding a letter from her parents that reveals she has a sister named Anna who's alive and living elsewhere. Hans goes after Elsa. Anna still saves her sister from him. The sisters are reunited and the cursed spell is broken. There's more here that I'm skipping, but the book is basically only the slightest twist on the movie and everything ends up the same. It wasn't awful but it was far from good.

Disney's Twisted Tales: Mirror, Mirror

Jen Calonita is added to the line-up of authors reworking these twisted versions of Disney movies. She's written this one, based on Snow White, and the next book in the series, which is based on Frozen. 

This is the weakest of the series so far, because it barely changes the story. It makes the queen a little more evil, because she kills Snow White's mother, who is the Evil Queen's younger sister. She banishes Snow's father and tells the people he abandoned them and his daughter. Then it goes right into the regular plot: Snow is a threat to her beauty and her crown so she has the huntsman kill her, but he can't and she finds the dwarves. The biggest difference here is what happens after because Snow is determined to take back her kingdom, instead of singing and playing house. The prince finds her and takes her to her father, who says he physically can't return to the kingdom because of the Evil Queen's curse. So it's up to the prince and the dwarves to team up with Snow and get the local villagers to help rise up against the queen. 

It is nice to see Snow and the prince spend more time together and more realistically develop feelings for each other. Then near the end comes the cover twist, which is the prince getting the poisoned apple, but he's poisoned for, like, a couple hours before Snow kisses him and breaks the spell. 

It was an enjoyable book, but not nearly as good as the others. It's only lightly twisted and even more lightly dark. Snow can't even kill the queen. She just sticks her in the dungeon after destroying the mirror after a bunch of simpering instances of her thinking about how she could never kill anyone. She's a witch who killed your mother, banished your father, neglected you and then tried to kill you repeatedly. Just fucking kill her. Sheesh. 

I'd say read this one is you're a bit of a completist like me who wants to read the whole series, but if you're just picking and choosing from this series, skip it.

AMERICAN GIRL: Z

Z is a different sort of American Girl. Suzanne "Z" Yang is one of only two contemporary characters that were released. These came alongside the regular 2017 Girl of the Year. There were criticisms of the other contemporary girl, Tenney, saying that she was originally supposed to be the GotY and Gabriela the second contemporary. This seems quite possible. 

I prefer Z to Tenney, because she's very similar to my favorite AG doll. It's nice to see a Korean-American character. 

Z is a filmographer who makes stopmotion videos featuring her American Girl dolls. She has a group of friends and online followers called Z's Crew. 

The first book has Z making her first "real" movie, a ten-minute piece for a competition. The second book has her on the road with her mother, a filmmaker, learning how to be an assistant. In both books, she makes error after error until she learns a lesson and then she succeeds. 

The books are a bit different because they're written by two different authors. 

They're decent, but far from the best in the series.

BELLES

I can't remember how I came across the Belles series. Might have been at the Panama City library. These are a trilogy of books by Jen Calonita, who's got quite a range of topics under her belt. I have several other books by her I need to read/review. 

I have started to get through this series twice now. It's honestly not that I don't enjoy the books. I've read the first two twice, but never made it through the third until today. I couldn't really tell you why. 

Belles is about two Southern girls from North Carolina. They're over on the coast, so I can't really speak of it, but I live in western NC right now and...it's not particularly Southern Belle-ish. I'm not sure why NC was picked as the setting because the two towns could really be anywhere along the southern East Coast.

I'm going to take a brief moment to talk about the covers, since I'm switching to writing beside the audiobook cover. 

These girls are supposed to be 15. They all look at the very least in their 20s. Sigh. Is it really hard to get cover models that are at least like 17 or something? 

Also, Isabelle "Izzie" Scott is undeniably the main character of all 3 of these books, yet she has no cover on the main versions. This woman on the audiobook I think is supposed to be her, but the covers of the actual books go to Mira (her cousin/sister), Savannah (the mean girl) and Charlotte (the new friend that only plays a bigger role in the 3rd book). 

Still not the best representations. Charlotte and Mira look right, but Savannah (the one on Winter White) is supposed to have brown eyes. Izzie, like Mira, has hazel, not the bright blue of the audiobook lady. 

Anyway. The first book is your typical Cinderella story. Izzie grew up in Harborside, raised by her grandmother after her mom dies in a car accident. It's a poorer town. When her grandmother's dementia gets too bad, she's placed in a nursing home while Izzie gets sent to Emerald Cove, a ritzy upperclass old money town, to live with her  newfound uncle and his family. The book is mostly about Izzie trying to fit in with everyone and how they all react to her. Mirabelle (IsaBELLE and MiraBELLE...BELLES) is her female cousin that's about the same age. Hayden is a little older and turns out to be the son of Mira's mom and her first husband, so he's not related to Izzie at all. And Connor, who's 6, rounds out the family. 

Izzie has drama with Savannah Ingram, the Emerald Prep queen bee, when it turns out Brayden, the guy Izzie surfed with over the summer, not only goes to Emerald Prep but is Savannah's boyfriend. Mira struggles through her own boy drama as well as finally seeing Savannah for who she really is. Hayden is the best character in this first book by a long shot. I like him a lot. Very down to earth and funny. 

As if all that wasn't enough to deal with, Izzie's uncle is running for state senator, so the entire family is under a constant microscope. Izzie has to deal with his campaign manager threatening her, which thankfully blows up in his face at the end. 

The big reveal is very predictable. The man Izzie thinks is her uncle is actually her father, though there was no scandal with him cheating on anyone. He never knew Izzie's mom was pregnant, so he didn't know Izzie existed until her grandmother contacted him before she declined too much. 

A lot of it is your typical teen drama YA stuff. Izzie ends up besting Savannah. She and Brayden end up together. Mira dumps her jock asshat boyfriend Taylor and wins the cute artsy boy that got her to realize she wanted to be an artist. 

The second book, Winter White, revolves around cotillion, the fancy schmancy female coming out ritual. Mira, finding herself with no friends after Savannah takes them all away, begs Izzie to do it with her. Izzie ends up enjoying the hazing part of it, because one of the older girls in charge clearly hates Savannah. 

Brayden's older sister Dylan is in town and Izzie sees a lot of herself in Dylan, but it turns out the girl is only there to cause trouble. There's a lot of drama with Brayden hiding things from Izzie, though Dylan helps them work things out in the end.

The girls find themselves in the spotlight in a bad way when photographers and a nasty reporter keep printing negative stories about them. The new aide their father found ends up being the culprit, paid off by Savannah's asshole father. My biggest problem with this book is that the aide gets away without much comeuppance and it turns out the jerk from the first book was involved, too. You'd think they could have their careers ruined or something satisfying, but no. Sigh. 

The third book opens with Izzie being depressed and not leaving her room for a month after her grandmother dies. The others finally get her back in the swing of things in time for her to help plan Founders Day (Izzie's big on philanthropy), bumping heads with Savannah all the way. 

Mira's found a new friend in Charlotte, a budding fashion designer, and the two take an art class together, where Mira meets a new hot boy to help her get over Kellan, her now ex-boyfriend who had to move away. 

Hayden is now seeing Kylie, Izzie's best friend from Harborside, and Izzie's not exactly thrilled about that. Kylie and Violet, one of Izzie's first friends at Emerald Prep, fight a lot. 

But the big drama is that we have yet another new family member reveal, which actually happened at the end of Winter White. It turns out Izzie's mom, Chloe, had a younger sister named Zoe. Zoe's a famous celebrity photographer and she's all of a sudden wanting back in everyone's lives. 

The series ends with everything getting mostly worked out. (Though Mira's new artsy boyfriend is the son of the nasty reporter that keeps going after the family.) Everyone makes up. Details of the past are revealed. Izzie gets closure with her grandmother after reading a letter from her that was in her safety deposit box. Mira and Izzie share a Sweet Sixteen party and the girls are closer than ever. So it wrapped up nicely, but I did enjoy the books a lot, so I wanted more. I would have liked Violet on the cover of the next one. She and Charlotte were probably my two favorites. 

If you like rich girl YA stuff, check these out. They've got more meat and less brand-dropping than Gossip Girl and the like. 

Sleepaway Girls

I got the urge to step away from my historical, horror and fantasy reads and delve back into the world of teen girls having fun. So I dug out the Jen Calonita books I hadn't gotten around to yet.

Sleepaway Girls was okay. The main character, Sam, is your typical can't-say-no type. She does whatever her best friend wants, but in a burst of independence, she decides to be a CIT at a camp for the summer instead of being third wheel to BFF and BFF's BF.

Sam has never done the camp thing before, but she seems to adjust mostly quickly. Although she harbors a ridiculous fear of wolves for the entire book.

She gets off on the wrong foot with the camp princess, who just so happens to be the owner's younger daughter. His older daughter is more like the camp queen, but she's nice.

So the book has Sam struggling with doing too many things for others, liking the hot boy who turns out to be a player and then realizing she's liked the nice (and also hot) boy who's been good to her all along, making friends, making enemies, and dealing with some insane drama.

The war between Sam and Ashley (the bratty princess) culminates in a food fight in the mess hall. The two are taken to the camp office where they're bitched at, but the staff keeps mentioning that they knew about this rivalry...and didn't do a fucking thing about it. The things Ashley does are very hurtful and she never gets any sort of proper comeuppance. You get the reasons why she did what she did, but she shows no remorse or even realization that she was a horrible, abusive bully.

The secondary cast was more enjoyable than the main and her rival. There's the boy crazy black girl who's secretly very artistic, the romance novel-obsessed more shy girl that finally gets herself some actual romance, and the sporty, driven, total Type A girl. Their characters are fun, but also could have been fleshed out a lot better than they were.

I wouldn't recommend this. Calonita's written better books. (Like the Belles trilogy, which I need to finish.) But it's a fun little romp that's a quick read and it did the trick.

Next up, I'm going back to the mid-90s for one of those BSC-inspired girl series: Adventurers Inc. Not that it's about babysitting, but it's a series of thin volumes with an ensemble cast of teen girls.