Reviews

Happily Ever Afters by Elise Bryant

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sweetdee85's review

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lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

laurenc26's review against another edition

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lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

captwinghead's review against another edition

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1.0

It is hard for someone to write a protagonist I truly dislike... but here we are.

It took 330 pages for the protagonist of this story to think about someone else's feelings. She spends the majority of this book barely considering how others could be hurt by her actions and she's one of the most self centered characters I've ever read about. Yes, I know people say that about authors all the time but that's partially why reading books about authors can be very hit or miss. I really didn't like Tessa as a character.

Spoiler

This book is about Tessa Johnson, a girl who's family just moved to Long Beach and she starts school at an arts academy called Chrysalis. She's half black, half white with a white mother and a black father who's always working. Her brother is HoH with cerebral palsy and sometimes that results in situations where he throws tantrums and Tessa is generally just embarrassed about what their neighbors will think.

Her neighbor Sam drives them to school each day, she meets a fashion student Lenore and a graphic arts student Theodore. Her old best friend Caroline calls her regularly. None of them, aside from Sam, seemed to find an issue with Tessa pursuing Nico, a guy who's already in a relationship. This is just part of why this "love story" was so annoying.

Tessa is struggling with writers block so Caroline comes up with an idea for her to get a real love life for inspiration. Tessa pursues Nico, even after learning he's dating Poppy. She even goes along with their stupid plan to break into a gated community that caters to people with dwarfism - with very little disagreement so is it really better that she raises a big question about them referring to the people with dwarfism ignorantly? She still went.

Aside from the uninteresting sterotypical plot where the girl pursues the wrong guy because she values all the wrong things and the right guy was beside her all along (I cannot count how many times this has been done), my biggest issue is that there was nothing likable about Tessa. Nothing at all.

She's a writer - cool, except she never writes anything. We get such tiny glimpses of what she writes and the 2 stories (one with Collette and one with Tallulah) appeared very similar. She was so determined to get into this school that's apparently so difficult that Sam, a guy with a rich parent, failed twice to get into, and she doesn't even work hard when she gets there. She skips class, she doesn't turn in proper assignments and then just lies when her mom asks her about it. So, she's a writer - but she never writes.

I'm not judging her response to her brother, because that's not fair. However, her treatment of her mother, Sam and Caroline all pointed to the fact that she just used the people in her life as support systems - without ever supporting them. Her mother is juggling a lot with trying to take care of her kids and have a personal life and she still finds time to worry about Tessa's grades, and getting shut out and lied to for it. Sam is supportive both emotionally and with taking her to and from school and constantly sharing food with her, and she spends half the book criticizing his clothing and being generally rude whenever anyone suggested they might be good to date each other. Caroline is pretty much just Siri - if Siri gave advice because that's all Tessa ever contacted her for. Whenever Caroline had stuff to talk about from her own life, Tessa couldn't really be bothered to listen.

All this culminates in 330 pages before Tessa starts to think maybe she could be a nicer person to the people around her. So, Sam deserved a lot better and I spent a lot of this book actively rooting against Tessa... *sighs*.

In other news, this book's discussions of racism were... a little confusing and Disney Channel esque for me. There are moments sprinkled throughout where Tessa talks about how white people perceive her and that moment where Sam gets upset for her over things like white people labelling desserts "crack" or that lady at the spice store racially profiling her. I don't necessarily get what the point of those moments were and I'm always confused when they're in books about upper middle class people of color because they appear to show the MC lecturing side characters on how to be allies but they just end up feeling clumsy to me.

Also, this book DN Eliot Page and hardly even touched on J.K. Rowling's controversies. Something else that makes Tessa not so great - she mentions it (briefly) and Nico just shrugs and says she's "still famous", clearly not seeing it as an issue. And Tessa still thinks he's attractive. Mind you, there are several HP references in this book.

Anyway, this wasn't for me. I hope other people enjoyed it.