Thursday, August 7, 2014

Review-Isla and the Happily Ever After


For the past hour I've been staring at my computer screen going over this book again and again in my head trying to decide what to say about it and I've come up with nothing.  Actually that's not true, I've come up with so much but none of it seems to fit together in a way that I think would create a coherent review so, because to stay on schedule with my reading I have to read 60 more pages of a completely different book, I've decided to just write what I have down regardless of how much sense it makes and call it my review.  

This book was everything that I wanted it to be and more so while I wanted to consume it entirely in one sitting I also didn't want to read any of it because once I started it was the beginning of the end.  In all honesty I wasn't sure about Josh as a love interest because his character in Anna was one that, while enjoyable, didn't overly appeal to me, but somehow Perkins worked her magic, like she always does, and I am in love with him like I am in love with all of her boys.  I didn't even realize until I started it but I was slightly worried that this book would just be a repeat of either Anna or Lola, but that wasn't the case.  There were moments when the plot had similarities between other YA contemp novels out there, but Perkins was, like always, able to create a story that was uniquely her own.  Again we got to go back to Paris, to where the whole thing started, and just like the first time Paris itself was almost a main character in the book.  The other characters were so whole.  Sometimes Isla drove me mad but the more I read the more I saw myself in her.  She also included a character that was on the autism spectrum, and while he was neither the love interest nor the main character to me this is just SO important and I love that she did it.  And the reappearance of the main characters from both Anna and Lola pushed this book from amazing to AMAZING.  The one little thing I wish would have been different was that while all of the main characters got their happy endings we see a side character form one of the previous books that I think also should have gotten one but, to my knowledge, didn't.  Although the fact that there's one story left open-ended in this world gives me hope that maybe one day Perkins will come back to it and write that character the ending that I think they deserve, and in the mean time I'm happy to read anything else that Perkins writes because in my mind she can do no wrong.

Officially out* August 14, 2014


5/5 dust spirits

*I found this book out early at my local B&N

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