The story follows the unlikely friendship of two young women forged via fan fiction and message boards, and is told entirely in texts, chats, and blog posts.
Gena (short for Genevieve) and Finn (short for Stephanie) have little in common. Book-smart Gena is preparing to leave her posh boarding school for college; down-to-earth Finn is a twenty-something struggling to make ends meet in the big city. Gena’s romantic life is a series of reluctant one-night-stands; Finn is making a go of it with long-term boyfriend Charlie. But they share a passion for Up Below, a buddy cop TV show with a cult fan following. Gena is a darling of the fangirl scene, keeping a popular blog and writing fan fiction. Finn’s online life is a secret, even from Charlie. The pair spark an unlikely online friendship that deepens quickly (so quickly it scares them both), and as their individual “real” lives begin to fall apart, they increasingly seek shelter online, and with each other.
—
Short and Sweet: Meh.
I don’t know why I continuously try to read books written entirely in some sort of odd format. I should know by now that I don’t like them. You never seem to get the whole story when you’re not actually following the characters around while they’re going about their day to day lives.
It’s not like I hated this, I really didn’t. It was just very easy to lose track of what was going on and become extremely bored. It reminds me of reading those little situations in text books and then trying to come up with a full bank reconciliation and monthly ledger when I was taking Accounting in college. There’s just not quite enough information to make everything click properly.
I couldn’t even form any connection to the characters in this novel. They just became names eventually and even though they explained some of their situation (family, work, ect.) I quickly mixed them up. There wasn’t even a description of what the characters looked like.
Also that weird, almost cheating story line that popped up was pretty strange and not cool at all if that’s what the authors were coming around to. See, it was just really hard to keep track of what was going on. Especially near the end when the authors threw in some random poetry that barely made any sense. At that point, I was just reading the book so it’d be over. And it ended so abruptly with no resolution whatsoever. Ugh.
I probably would of enjoyed this more if I had read it as a paper back and not as an e-book. My senior citizen of a Kindle didn’t take to this novel too kindly and ended up messing up almost all of the formatting.
I definitely didn’t love this book, but it did show me that I need to avoid novels with different formats. Even if I do think they’re cool, I really don’t enjoy them. Should of figured it out when I was reading Illuminae.
A lot of people are comparing this to Fangirl. But seriously, if you like the idea of this novel.. just go read Fangirl. It’s a lot better.
Bree Howland 