Review- A Really Awesome Mess (Trish Cook & Brendan Halpin)

Synopsis

Two teenagers. Two very bumpy roads taken that lead to Heartland Academy.

Justin was just having fun, but when his dad walked in on him with a girl in a very compromising position, Justin's summer took a quick turn for the worse. His parents' divorce put Justin on rocky mental ground, and after a handful of Tylenol lands him in the hospital, he has really hit rock bottom.

Emmy never felt like part of her family. She was adopted from China. Her parents and sister tower over her and look like they came out of a Ralph Lauren catalog-- and Emmy definitely doesn't. After a scandalous photo of Emmy leads to vicious rumors around school, she threatens the boy who started it all on Facebook.

Justin and Emmy arrive at Heartland Academy, a reform school that will force them to deal with their issues, damaged souls with little patience for authority. But along the way they will find a ragtag group of teens who are just as broken, stubborn, and full of sarcasm as themselves. In the end, they might even call each other friends.

A funny, sad, and remarkable story, A Really Awesome Mess is a journey of friendship and self-discovery that teen readers will surely sign up for.          - Goodreads.com

My Review 

A really awesome mess is a difficult one for me to review. One half of me enjoyed this book, devouring almost half of it in one sitting, but the other half of me saw that the book was rife with poor understanding of the conditions that the authors were discussing.

The book itself is about Emmy and Justin, and is told in each of their perspectives. They have both been sent to a reform school…or so the blurb indicates. But Heartland Academy is much less a reform school and more a facility for teens who are suffering from an array of mental illnesses. Emmy has developed anorexia after a bad break-up, while Justin has been suffering from depression and also made an attempt on his own life.

There are plenty of mixed reviews on Goodreads, and I can definitely see why. A lot of people seem to be upset at the way the authors portrays some mental illnesses. However in the same instance I don’t believe it was the author’s intention to give us a meaningful insight into these disorders, so that we could come out the other side with a deeper understanding of what these diseases are. I feel like the book focused more on the bonds and friendships that were formed between the characters despite their differences and commonalities. If this was the authors intention she succeeded. For me there was a great sense of companionship between all the kids in the Heartland Academy group.

As for the main characters at first I really didn’t like Emmy, she was just too up herself, and for me and just didn’t seem to fit the anorexic/bulimia profile that I expected. She came off as a spoilt brat, who liked to fat shame other people in her head. 

"I stared at her like she was from another planet. To me, she actually was: The Planet F-A-T. I felt sorry for her. If I still felt this bad after losing twenty pounds, she must absolutely despise herself."

- Trish Cook & Brendan Halpin (A Really Awesome Mess)

Personally, I always thought anorexia was more of an inward distortion of your own body image rather than an outward view of others bodies as well as your own…but then again maybe there’s a spectrum and Emmy just sits at a different place than I was expecting.

As for Justin, his character kind of grew on me. I felt like he got somewhere by the end, like he had made this small dent in his journey to helping himself get better. 

"How do you get through it?” He was asking about my latest downturn, but I guessed the question could apply to life, too. And I didn’t know the answer."

- Trish Cook & Brendan Halpin (A Really Awesome Mess)

Overall the book wasn't quite what I had expected. I thought it was going to be about naughty reform school kids getting up to all sorts of mischief, I still got the naughty  mischief part, but with a lot more heart than I was expecting. 

Things I loved about the book:

• The camaraderie between the Heartland kids, and the misadventures they got up to.  

Things I didn't love about the book:

• The seemingly simple and glanced over conditions of the characters. I felt there could have been more depth there, even if the authors weren't aiming for that kind of book.

My rating: 3/5

Do you ever go into a book expecting one thing and getting something completely different?

Review- Of Beast and Beauty (Stacey Jay)

Synopsis

In the beginning was the darkness, and in the darkness was a girl, and in the girl was a secret...

In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe. 

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.          - Goodreads.com

My Review 

Of Beast and Beauty is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast but with an almost dystopia feel to it with the added undertows of an Asian background (or maybe it was just the names that threw me.) Unlike the original, in this story the beast is held captive, by the Princess after attempting to steal roses from the sacred garden in the domed city of Yuan. Which he believes to be the salvation of his people who are slowly dying out in the desert.

Isra; the Princess of our tale, has so many elements to her. Being blind, has meant that she has been hidden and held captive from the city by her father for most of her life. Upon his death and her success to the throne she is still constantly kept in the dark. She is seen as weak and unable to truly rule a city. However despite this weakness, her character is defiant and strong and lives her own life in spite of her disability. Every night she rebelliously crawls out of her tower to visit the sacred garden and explore a city where she has never been truly accepted due to her slightly monstrous deformities. She even ventures outside of the domed walls of her city to help her people, in search of a cure for the monstrous deformities plaguing some of its civilians.

 

Gem; our beast, our monster, is deeply complex. His character develops so much over the course of the book. In the beginning when he is captured, all he wants it to escape and fulfil his duty of stealing roses from the sacred garden to help save his people who are nicknamed the ‘monstrous’ by the domed and live outside the city walls. He hates Isra and all that she and her city stand for. He thinks that she is selfish and naïve to the world. However after spending to with one another, he sees that she is nothing like the people who truly rule the city and wants to help her.

"Its pointless. Hopeless. Even if she weren't afraid of me, we'll always be enemies at the core. She rules a wicked, selfish city, and my tribe suffers for her peoples comfort. Shes a queen; I'm her prisoner. I resent her and she fears me, and there are times when I fear her, too. I am her monster, and she is mine. But right now none of it matters."

- Stacey Jay (Of Beast and Beauty)

The book is told from two perspectives, which means you really get into the minds of each character, understanding their motives, their hopes, their feelings. Both of the characters are written extraordinarily, and they each grow and develop so much throughout the book. The romance between them is not overdone, and is sweet and buddy like a rose. 

Things I loved about the book:

• The intro was beautifully written and explained how the division between the Monstrous and city inhabitants came to be, and how the curse began.
• The slow developing romance, that happened gradually and authentically.
• While the curse differed from the original, the symbolism still remained. 

My rating: 4/5

Do you like reading re-tellings? What is your favorite fairy tale?

Feature and Follow (14)

Here's this weeks question:

 

Do you own any doubles of your books? What led to getting that second...third...or fourth copy?

At the moment I don't actually have any double ups that I can think of. Mostly I have double ups on my shelf if I find a book I want in a second hand store, and then later find the same book in better condition. Sometimes I also get double ups if I've brought a book online and it's arrived damaged in the post, then I usually donate the damaged copies. 

Feature & Follow is a blog hop hosted by Parajunkee and Alison Can Read. The purpose is to meet new people and gain more followers in the book blogging community.