A review by heather425
Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale
3.0
Josie Pie was kind of a big deal in high school. She actually tells people this several times in the book. At the beginning of her senior year her drama teacher convinces her that she's so good she should leave school to audition for Broadway. So, at seventeen Josie packs off to NYC to pursue her dreams. And, not surprising to any adult, that doesn't work out like she thinks it will. She goes from a big fish in a little pond to a very tiny fish in the ocean. Not wanting to admit defeat she stays in NYC and eventually becomes a nanny for a family that ends up moving to Montana. In Montana we see Josie basically raising the little girl while licking her wounds from her failures. Then one day the little girl pulls Josie into a bookstore and Josie rediscovers her love of books. Only now instead of just enjoying the stories she is literally pulled into them.
I liked the idea of a reader being pulled into the pages of the book they are reading. However, this was clunky at times. Part of what didn't work for me was she was envisioning the characters in the books as people she knew in real life. Which makes sense, but then the author would alternately refer to them as the in real life name and the book character name. It made things a bit confusing. I could see this working on the screen, but in a book it just felt hard to follow.
Josie does grow as a character and that was needed. She starts off as someone who is stuck in their glory days of high school and by the end she sees that she still has a lot of learning to do. I wish we had more in depth of her relationship with Nina. That would have been more interesting to see the past, present, and future of than her relationship with Justin. I could have used less of the crazy plot lines of the books Josie read and more of how she grew as a person within her real life relationships.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!
I liked the idea of a reader being pulled into the pages of the book they are reading. However, this was clunky at times. Part of what didn't work for me was she was envisioning the characters in the books as people she knew in real life. Which makes sense, but then the author would alternately refer to them as the in real life name and the book character name. It made things a bit confusing. I could see this working on the screen, but in a book it just felt hard to follow.
Josie does grow as a character and that was needed. She starts off as someone who is stuck in their glory days of high school and by the end she sees that she still has a lot of learning to do. I wish we had more in depth of her relationship with Nina. That would have been more interesting to see the past, present, and future of than her relationship with Justin. I could have used less of the crazy plot lines of the books Josie read and more of how she grew as a person within her real life relationships.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC!