Review by sweetsxrrxw - I Am Not Jessica Chen

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sweetsxrrxw 's review for:

I Am Not Jessica Chen by Ann Liang

4.0

emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

i just finished reading this book after many months of being stuck in a reading slump and, honestly, right now my head is so full of thoughts that i am certain i will forget to write everything i'd like to tell, so i this review is going to have different subsections. although, i'd like to start off by saying i would have loved to read this book back when i was sixteen. it's true that, even now, from time to time, i can't help but wish i could be someone else; but i am sure that younger me would have loved this book so much.

academic success and family expectations

while reading, like most people who have reviewed this book, i felt so connected and related a lot with jenna. i am also an overachiever, someone who craves academic validation so bad that my whole life has revolved around it since i was young.
but now i realize i might have also been a jessica to some people, especially during primary school. while it's true that i had no friends for 1/3 of that stage and i had absolutely never been popular, i was the best at every subject (except for physical education, for sure). however, of course, success is temporary and once i started secondary school i began feeling a bit more like jenna: insecure, hating being at second place, feeling like no matter how many all-nighters i pulled my grades were never high enough and that i was always secretly competing with a bunch of people.

i'm shrinking myself down, down as small as physically possible when the teacher forces me to join the group of best friends in the back, like the unwanted product in a clearance sale. i'm pretending i can't hear when one of them whispers, "god, not her," but maybe the whole point is that i can hear them.

and when my family boasted about me being smart in front of relatives, with me being there too, i always felt uncomfortable, like an imposter, even when i knew i was always doing my best.

i'm simply not that good. not in academics. not in extracurriculars. not as a student, or a daughter, or a human. it doesn't matter if i crammed my brain to the point of breaking with formulas and dates, threw myself into classes [...] something in me is missing. lacking.

moreover, as a daughter of immigrants, there is always this never-ending guilt creeping in. guilt about how you're supposed to use all of your potential, to use the academic chances your parents never had but are now offering you, just so that somehow you can repay them in a future. in case you're wondering, imposter syndrome does not blend well with this crushing sense of remorse.

how am i supposed to confess to my parents that everything they've done for me—leaving behind their old lives, moving across the world, spending what should've been vacation money on overpriced textbooks, waking up at down to drive me to tutoring centers, all so i could have a better education—was for nothing?

self worth and loss of identity

i think the topic of adapting or even losing parts of your personality, letting go of things you genuinely loved doing, just to become a better version of yourself was very interesting. just as jenna recounts in the book, we spend so much time scrutinizing ourselves in the mirror, analyzing all of our flaws until our face simply becomes boring and ugly. we detest being bad at things. but, at the end of the day, it is this little museum of failures or gallery of trying that makes us human and unique.

i guess sometimes you just have to go through some big event (maybe switching bodies with someone you admire? lmao) just to see how beautiful the cracks and the ordinary things in your life are, just to realize there's always gonna be at least one person who truly loves the real you.

chasing perfection requires a lot of self-deprecation but, once again, if you come from a specific background, it's pretty easy to mistake your purposes and goals for your values...

"no, you think i'm perfect. you think everyone's so much better than they really are, and you think you're so much worse than you really are. i was only a goal to you," he tells me, swallowing. "i was a dream, someone unattainable, something you built up inside your head. you forget how well i know you, jenna. there's nothing you want more than to want—you'll obsess over something, and convince yourself that so long as tou get it, you'll be happy, but then once you do, you're immediately dissatisfied and want something else."

that's what we do, isn't it? we turn pain into a story, because then it has a purpose. then, we reason, there was a point to it all along. but sometimes pain is just pain, and there's nothing particularly noble about clinging to it.

i really like the detail of how jenna started to slowly disappear from everyone's life. not only her stuff was thrown in the garage. but also all of her ways of self-expression started to fade too. like, her self-portraits (aka something she enjoyed doing) slowly getting blurry was a bit scary but also a nice way to convey the message.

romance
one thing i loved about this book is how it made me giggle, blush and kick my feet several times. sure, this is all fiction and there's no aaron cai's in real life, but he really brought back the hopeless romantic that was buried in me and i love that. i think he might be one of ann liang's best love interests.

i do think that the reason why he left was kind of stupid. i think it would have been better if he said he came back because he missed her, instead of telling her he couldn't handle the idea of jenna rejecting him after her limerence faded away. however, him being the "what do you think" and "you make my world bigger" kind of guy made me forget about that lmao.

secondary characters
both aaron and jessica are supposed to be secondary characters to this story, and while we got a closer look at aaron's life and personality, i feel like jessica's was brushed off. i get that maybe that's the point: perfection equals superficiality. however, i would have liked to see a bit more of her "flawed" self and her relationship with her cousin

especially since we didn't get much closure, considering the whole body switch thing. it would have been nice if we got a few more looks at their dynamics after it was all over

.

overall
even though the plot was quite predictable at times, i genuinely enjoyed this read and i would actually love to watch it as a movie adaptation. i could see it playing in my head while reading, so i definitely think it has full potential to be on the screens!

Content Warnings