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jaxreadshere_21 's review for:
Username: Evie
by Joe Sugg
Oh dear. I picked this up on a whim since the premise looked cute and the art style looked decent, but I guess I should've read a bit of it before committing to buying it. When I did sit down and read the first few pages (the prelude, essentially) I immediately worried I might have made a mistake. A clunky intro doesn't mean a bad story though, so I continued on, hoping it would improve. Unfortunately, it didn't.
The characters were all one-dimensional and archetypal and had no real growth (just have a character say out loud 'look how much i've improved!' without them having actually done anything is meaningless). I couldn't get attached to any of them because they were just so...hollow. They didn't feel alive on the page since they were all archetypes with nothing particularly unique or individual about them (other than Evie's fridge thing maybe, never seen that before). The dialogue was clunky at best as well, and none of the jokes landed for me. The message was sweet, but the story didn't actually deliver it well since it was so simplistic with hardly anything that really happens (which would be fine if the characters or some other aspect of the book was well developed and complex, but everything was equally basic and skimmed over).
Everything that needed to be explained could have been done so using the characters' actions, interactions, and the art itself, and yet the book relied completely on the yellow exposition boxes. There's no sense of how long the main character is in the virtual world either, and the way the virtual world worked was inconsistent (for example: everyone knows who Evie is except the Lionel duplicate when she first meets him...?). The art, at least, was decent, but the panels didn't always flow well with the dialogue/exposition.
It really is too bad, since the premise is interesting and the message is nice, but this book just really didn't work.
The characters were all one-dimensional and archetypal and had no real growth (just have a character say out loud 'look how much i've improved!' without them having actually done anything is meaningless). I couldn't get attached to any of them because they were just so...hollow. They didn't feel alive on the page since they were all archetypes with nothing particularly unique or individual about them (other than Evie's fridge thing maybe, never seen that before). The dialogue was clunky at best as well, and none of the jokes landed for me. The message was sweet, but the story didn't actually deliver it well since it was so simplistic with hardly anything that really happens (which would be fine if the characters or some other aspect of the book was well developed and complex, but everything was equally basic and skimmed over).
Everything that needed to be explained could have been done so using the characters' actions, interactions, and the art itself, and yet the book relied completely on the yellow exposition boxes. There's no sense of how long the main character is in the virtual world either, and the way the virtual world worked was inconsistent (for example: everyone knows who Evie is except the Lionel duplicate when she first meets him...?). The art, at least, was decent, but the panels didn't always flow well with the dialogue/exposition.
It really is too bad, since the premise is interesting and the message is nice, but this book just really didn't work.