Chelsea Pitcher

This book was different than I expected. The style feels like a film noir, with short sentences, an investigation, a troubled personal life.

The book is about what happens after someone's best friend commits suicide after being slut-shamed into a pariah. The main character starts investigating how this came to be and starts uncovering some dark secrets about the people in her high school.

But that's just the hook. This book invokes just about every after-school special trope -- monstrous show more teens, the too-smart witch, the attention tramp, the handsome sex-crazed jock, cheerleaders, gay/not gay, date rape, the wild teen party, climbing through a bedroom window to see your girl, "Dude, she's like in a coma", defiled forever, driven to suicide, rape leads to insanity, self-harm, sneaking alcohol in high school, "secretly a lesbian", divorced parents, secret molestation, overly Christian parents, the big reveal, and of course, slut-shaming and finishes with a "decoy protagonist/killer in me" combo.

I'm not trying to say a story with lots of tropes is bad. All stories have them. But the problem is that all these tropes are front and center. Like a Lifetime movie. They're all part of the plot turns and revelations. Which means that the characters herein are stereotypes. My beef is that it keeps painting high school with the same brush that all movies and YA books paint it with. Like how no one has academics to worry about. How does the main character get all this "investigating" done? Between passing times?

Don't get me wrong, I like this book, but it's controversial simply because the characters demand it. To the point of being ridiculously implausible. One of the characters is gay. So gay he wears a skirt to school. And of course, the jocks beat him up for it. But then he tells the main character he's not gay, he's just acting like it. Because... reasons?

I was fooled by the summary in its Big Idea piece. I thought this was going to be a book about a girl going vigilante revenge for her friend who got slut-shamed into suicide, and then the revenge starts to consume her, where she couldn't stop. That is most definitely not this book. This book is much like the high schoolers it's portraying -- a hot mess.

It did keep me reading. It was a completely acceptable story with a great style. It's powerful. But it's trying to be a 'super YA novel'. It simply has too many ingredients, like a hamburger with forty things in it. You don't need that many to make a good hamburger. Too much stuff, and it becomes too rich to digest. show less

How do you cope when you're part of an evil family? This would be a difficult question for any teen, but what if you're nonhuman? This is the challenge Elora faces as a young princess of the dark faeries. She hates the way her mother the Dark Queen treats others, but despises her half brother even more. When she makes a bargain with the Bright Queen, it sets in motion more than Elora ever expected, starting with a cryptic demand: “Bring me a human boy who is a 'young leader of show more men.'”
After crossing over to the mortal world, Elora assumes the shape of a teen hitchiker who dies in an auto accident, hiding the body before appearing on a swing set near the soccer field where Taylor is wrestling with how to prevent the team bully from seriously injuring a player on the opposing team.
When he notices her, sitting on a swing, it's the beginning of an extremely interesting journey for both of them, one that unfolds gradually at first, but speeds up as things come to a head in her world. Along the way, they start realizing how much they're attracted to each other, she discovers how quirky and often unfair the world of high school is (her involvement with the Gay-Straight Alliance is very refreshing and her backtalk to school staff is really funny at times), she has to control her urge to give in to her feelings which begin to conflict with everything she was taught in her world and she has to educate her new friends to the threat coming from her realm.
The book ends with a slam bang and as a result, I ordered book two immediately. This is a great urban fantasy for school and public libraries to add to their YA collections. show less

Prom night was all it took to ruin a childhood friendship. When Lizzie is caught in bed with her best friends boyfriend during the dance, the school turns against her and brands her a ‘slut’. With everyone making her life hell, and with Angie still not speaking to her, Lizzie decides to end her own life. But someone doesn’t want people to forget. A week after her funeral, graffiti and photocopied pages of Lizzie’s diary start to show up at school. Angie starts investigating who, show more exactly, is spreading Lizzie’s personal thoughts as well as who made her best friend feel like she didn’t belong in the world anymore. The truth she uncovers as well as the anguish she feels for abandoning her best friend become too much to handle and Angie spirals out of controls. Love and friendship help pull her out of the dark.

The S-Word grabbed my attention from the very first sentence and did not let go until long after I had read the last word. This book is jam-packed with mystery, betrayal, and the very real harshness that is high school drama. Despite the heavy subjects present in the book, this still has it’s funny moments which really help balance everything out. Normally I have a good idea of what a book is going to be about, but holy crap this took a turn that I never saw coming. I don’t want to say much, but I will give you this: we are hit with not one, but three shocking secrets--one right after another--that never even crossed my mind.

I love, love, LOVE Angie. Everyone has this idea that she’s just a dumb, popular cheerleader, but she isn’t at all. She is not only dealing with a broken heart, but she is mourning the death of her best friend and carrying around this heart wrenching guilt over turning her back on Lizzie when everyone else was determined to destroy her. She is a great and very complex main character and I just love how she narrates the story. Unfortunately we do not get to see much of Lizzie, but her diary entries and the flashbacks of their friendship help us understand what kind of a person she was. She in no way deserved what was thrown at her and, frankly, neither does anyone else who is bullied on a daily basis. It is sickening the kind of torture teenagers can cause one another.

I was expecting to like this, but not as much as I actually did. This is a fantastic debut and I can not wait to read whatever else Chelsea has in store for us! show less

I won my first book to review from Netgalley!

Parental Rating: 12 and up. Mild Swearing and teenage ‘making out’.

The faerie Elora is trying to start a rebellion against her mother the Dark Queen, but to overthrow a millennium old faerie she needs the Bright Queen's help. The Bright Queen sets her a riddle, asking Elora to bring her a human offering. Elora travels to the human world, having only heard bad things about humans. She meets a human high-schooler named Taylor who lets her stay show more at his house. (She tells him to call him Lora, which is the name she mostly goes by in the book.)

The book is told from the perspectives of both Lora and Taylor. At the beginning Lora has a poetic voice and makes her seem more otherworldly, but as she assimilates to the human world she talks more normally. There were a couple of instances where Taylor sounded like Lora, too poetic for a normal teenage boy, but overall the characters were realistic and distinct. Though they were both told in first person I didn't confuse the two.

The characters were the stars of the story. I genuinely liked both of the main characters, which isn't always the case for me. The romance between them was gradual and felt natural. It was a sweet realistic romance. The side characters were just as good as the main characters and the friendships blossomed at a realistic pace the same way the relationship did.

Taylor and Lora gradually grow to trust one another and it makes them both better people. The change in their personalities is gradual and well done. They've both had a rough family life and they both have their secrets. They slowly open up to one another, and it felt like they would actually reveal these closely guarded secrets. Lora’s tells her story to Taylor as a nightly ‘fairy tale’. Since there is a lot of back story, this was a good way to do it without being boring.

Though there is plenty of magic in this book and excitement at the end, most of the book isn't fast paced. That doesn't mean it’s boring, not in the least. The Last Changeling mostly takes place in a modern high school and romance plays a large part of the story. Normally this wouldn't sound like my kind of book, but I really enjoyed it! There’s the normal teenage stuff, but it’s handled well and Lora is so different it’s fun to see through her eyes and watch her navigate the human world.

The world of the faerie has been done so many times, but the author still creates her own unique mythology. Like most fairies, those in Last Changeling can’t lie outright, are hurt by iron, and use glamours. (They also have wings, which I thought was the best part!) There isn't too much magic in the book, but what was there was imaginative and just plain cool.

There wasn't a to be continued ending, which I appreciated, but there’s certainly more to come. (At least I hope there is!) I would've appreciated if one question had been answered though. (I can’t say what it was without spoilers.)

I plan to buy The Last Changeling when it’s released and would highly recommend it.

8/10 Stars show less