Stephanie
Written on Feb 21, 2018
Meet Scarlett Epstein, BNF (Big Name Fan) in her online community of fanfiction writers, world- class nobody at Melville High. Her best (read: only) IRL friends are Avery, a painfully shy and annoyingly attractive bookworm, and Ruth, her pot-smoking, possibly insane seventy-three-year- old neighbor.When Scarlett's beloved TV show is cancelled and her longtime crush, Gideon, is sucked out of her orbit and into the dark and distant world of Populars, Scarlett turns to the fanfic message boards for comfort. This time, though, her subjects aren't the swoon-worthy stars of her fave series--they're the real-life kids from her high school. Scarlett never considers what might happen if they were to find out what she truly thinks about them...until a dramatic series of events exposes a very different reality than Scarlett's stories, forever transforming her approach to relationships--both online and off.
- ISBN13 9781595148360
- Publish Date 28 March 2017 (first published 19 April 2016)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 29 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Razorbill
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 288
- Language English
Reviews
A Darker Shade of Rosie
Written on Jan 2, 2018
→ LIKED: Scarlett is snarky, ill-humored, and doesn't fit in. I appreciated her 'voice' and how she was a flawed character. • The novel is rich with internet culture. • I applauded Scarlett's sassiness, which is a character trait I can (almost) always approve of. • I enjoyed her journey to being comfortable and confident in her writing (it's a journey I'm on myself), but in the long run, her relationships and the way she dealt with them were more my cup of tea. • I loved her friendship with Ruth, her elderly pot-smoking feminist neighbor. She may have seemed irresponsible on the outside, but she turned out to be a wonderful role model for Scarlett. • Her love interest's name is Gideon - points for being a bad ass name.
→ DISLIKED: • The fanfiction aspect of the novel just seemed...lacking. I got excited about it when it was first introduced, because I've recently read another book where it worked phenomenally, but here... not so much.
abigailjohnson
Written on Jun 13, 2016
SCARLETT is full of pop culture references and immersed in the online world of fanfiction. Looking back at the description, I shouldn't have been surprised to find a book within a book here. A major part of this book (like entire chapters, not like FANGIRL'S page at the beginning of chapters) is Scarlett's fanfiction story about teenage sexbots who are sent to a private school in order to learn how to be more human. The fanfic is meant to loosely parallel characters and elements from Scarlett's real life, but honestly, it was just so bizarre and--I'm guessing intentionally--read like bad fan fiction. The sad part is that the fanfiction story is the only real plot in the book.
Scarlett's IRL (in real life) story is a slow, meandering nothing. She goes from person to person, recounting how them met and disappointed her (in most cases) while making pithy observations and jokes that fell completely flat and/or were in pretty bad taste. The story picks up a tiny bit towards the end, but not enough to salvage the book for me.
Bianca
Written on Apr 27, 2016
But maybe the most valuable thing she taught me is the importance of trying to understand people who are different from you, even though it’s so much harder than writing them off, because it might make you admit something to yourself that’s painful. Sometimes you won’t be able to understand, and that’s okay. It’s the trying, and realizing the importance of trying, that makes a person really special.
— Loved the message of this book! Try to understand people instead of judging them.