Review of This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey

Carey, Anna.  This Is not the Jess Show.  Quirk Books, 2020.

Jessica Flynn is a seventeen-year-old junior who plays clarinet in the high school band.  She comes from a nice family; her mother is an interior designer, but her dad isn’t around all the time.  She loves Swickley, NY, the small town where she has grown up.  Jess has three good friends, Kristen and Amber, and Tyler, who she realizes is now her first crush.  The only sad thing in her life is that her sister, Sara, has Guignard’s disease, a terminal illness.

 

Jessica begins to notice some strange things happening around Swickley.  She realizes that many of her school classmates and townspeople are absent with the flu.  She can hear strange chanting in the distance, but no one else seems to notice.  A black object with an apple on it falls out of Amber’s backpack, and she pretends not to know what it is.  And the weirdest thing of all is, her dog, Fuller, seems different; he acts like he doesn’t know her.

 

Jess feels like someone is always watching her, and she eventually realizes that she a character on a reality show called Stuck in the 90s.  She decides to escape, although the cast is trying to prevent her from leaving.  As she is being hunted down by the network, she gets help from sympathetic cast members and learns the year is actually 2037!  She concludes that her whole life has been a lie, and she never wants to go back to 1998.

 

This Is Not the Jess Show has been billed as The Truman Show for teens.  Author Anna Carey has written a fun, engaging read that is a real page-turner.  The way the story unfolds is rather unremarkable in the beginning, until Jess finds out that she has been living a lie her whole life.  Jess seems very naïve at first because she is fooled by changing characters and people playing multiple roles in her “life”.  However, when she discovers that she has been misled, she shows what a strong character she is by running away.  This only adds to the show’s drama because the network is milking her escape and using social influencers—shades of today-- to poll viewers as to possible outcomes.  

 

The addition of the 90s nostalgia and memorabilia to the story enhances the authenticity of the reality show.  The story has some surprising twists and turns, and the ending sets readers up for the next book of the duology.  Hand this book to readers who enjoy 90s bands and nostalgia and reality shows.  I recommend it for middle school, high school, and public libraries and give it four out of five fleur de lis!

Thank you to NetGalley and Quirk Books for allowing me to read and review this book.