About the Book
-
Author:
- Tracy Badua
- Genre:
- Contemporary
Cover Story: Bookish Baggage
BFF Charm: Oda Mae Brown
Talky Talk: Ivy League-ish
Bonus Factor: Dorm Lyfe!
Relationship Status: Hi, I’m The Problem, The Problem Is Me
Cover Story: Bookish Baggage
A Filipina girl is carrying a ton of books and a stuffed messenger bag against a red background. It’s very on-the-nose and also very cute. I dig it.
The Deal:
Perla “Perlie” Perez is a sixteen-year-old prodigy-graduate of the competitive Monte Verde High School. She’s so sure she’s going to complete her Perfect Plan – that is, get into her top-choice college, Delmont, as a premed major and go on to help her mother in her upscale dermatology practice – that she didn’t apply to any backup safety schools. When she’s rejected from Delmont, Perla decides to fake it til she makes it, and attends the university anyway with a Photoshopped acceptance letter and a lot of chutzpah. Her end goal? To know what makes a Delmont student, so she can re-apply for the spring semester. Anxiety mounts as she spins a web of lies. Will this house of cards topple down on Perla?
BFF Charm: Oda Mae Brown
The entire time Perla concocted her new Perfect Plan, I was like, you in danger, girl. And then she has the audacity to execute it! She lives on campus somehow, she relies on the goodwill of her new friends to swipe her into the dining hall, she opens a credit card with forged signatures – like, she does all the things that are bad ideas. And yet you feel for Perla. Her parents are typical Asian tiger-moms who climbed the white-collar ladder and who instilled in her this perfection that can’t be shaken, so she does what she feels she HAS to do in order to make them proud.
Swoonworthy Scale: 0
There is zero swoon here. There’s a cute guy, of course, but there is more chemistry between Perla and her seven-point spreadsheet than there is with him. It’s okay, though; you will be so anxiety-ridden that Perla will get found out that you won’t even want additional complications.
Talky Talk: Ivy League-ish
Perla doesn’t wield her SAT vocab like you think a sixteen-year-old genius would; but at the same time, you know she has a lot of growing up to do. This crash course in independent living is HARD, y’all, and her mistakes are what Fiona Apple would call “doing it on purpose.”
Bonus Factor: Dorm Lyfe!
We don’t see a lot of college life in YA, probably because college is for “new adults.” However, having a student who skipped a couple of grades means that we can have a sixteen-year-old main character who is on the hallowed grounds of a well-respected university. Dorms and getting kicked out of your room, dining halls with double servings of chicken alfredo, lecture halls where quizzes are surprises even if you read the syllabus – this book takes me back to the way it felt to be a fish out of water in a new place, still getting my bearings.
Relationship Status: Hi, I’m The Problem, The Problem Is Me
I can’t be the only person who read you, Book, and was full of anxiety, right? Yet the adrenaline was addictive and I needed to know more about Perla’s plight. This was a nail-biter!
Literary Matchmaking
Fresh by Margot Wood also takes place on a college campus, though with far more sex.
See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon is about an outcast on a college campus, with Gilmore Girls vibes.
When You Get the Chance by Emma Lord has a perfectionist protagonist hell-bent on getting into a good pre-college program.
FTC Full Disclosure: I received a free review copy from the publisher. I received neither compensation nor kittens in exchange for this review. This Is Not a Personal Statement is out now.
What is with all these books with people who apply for one school and then don’t get in? Do schools in the U.S. let you just apply to one school?!
This book is, in a word, DREADFUL. The premise is preposterous, and the plot is completely implausible. Any person who has any relationship with university or college acceptances and attendance knows that NOTHING in this book could ever happen. As such, the book is redundant and unrealistic. With the great many excellent YA titles out there, do not waste your time with Badua’s work. I am a middle school English teacher (30+ years), and I am astonished by the absurdity of the story and the author’s attempt to execute it. For realistic fiction to work, it has to be that word: realistic. I’m serious when I say that nothing other than the protagonist applying to a lot of big schools because of parental pressure is even remotely believable. This book had me wanting REAL books about that time in life – Catcher in the Rye, or even Less Than Zero – give me books with real teeth that show real characters dealing with real issues. This novel has none of that. Perfect Perlie is condescending and patronizing. Meanwhile, Badua has a penchant for characterizing every white guy as some version of a slack-jawed surfer dude, and offers a highly superior, pitying attitude towards working class people. I’d say that she’s done a great job of creating a disagreeable protagonist in the way that, say, Dickens does in a number of his novels, but I HIGHLY doubt she has made Perlie a disagreeable protagonist on purpose.