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.

Review of Shallow Pond by Alissa Grosso

Grosso, Alissa.  Shallow Pond.  flux, 2013. 

The Bunting sisters have lived in Shallow Pond, Pennsylvania all their lives and people constantly mistake one sister for another.  The oldest sister, Annie, has raised the two younger girls ever since their mom and dad passed away.  The youngest sister, Barbara, nicknamed “Babie”, is a senior in high school and wants nothing more than to graduate and leave Shallow Pond forever.  Babie’s best friends are always trying to pair her up with guys at school, and when a new, handsome orphaned guy named Zack Faraday arrives at school, Jenelle and Shawna decide he would be the perfect date for Babie for the town’s winter carnival.

Although Babie feels an instant connection with Zack, she has no desire to have a relationship that might cause her to want to stay in Shallow Pond.  She doesn’t want to end up like Annie, now twenty-six, who was dumped by her boyfriend, Cameron Schaeffer, when she was a high school senior, or like her other sister, Gracie, now twenty-one, who works as a cashier in the town’s only grocery store.

Cameron Schaeffer has recently returned to Shallow Pond after losing his job, and Gracie has fallen in love with him.  Babie is not happy with Gracie over this development because she was hoping that Cameron and Annie would reunite.  When Cameron leaves town unexpectedly, Gracie hurries to find him.

Annie has been sick, and when she begins to get even worse, her sisters rush her to a hospital where she is treated by one of their father’s friends.  It turns out that she has a mysterious genetic illness and could soon die.  This revelation releases a series of events that take the book in a totally different direction!

Told in first person by Babie, this novel started out very slowly and repetitious.  The same scenes kept reoccurring—Babie hates Shallow Pond, and her friends love it.  Babie doesn’t want a boyfriend, but she is drawn to Zack.  Babie talks to Zack and then runs away from him.  Finally, about midway through the book, the plot began to branch out.  

Science fiction fans and readers who love a good romance will enjoy Shallow Pond.  I recommend it for high school and public libraries.  I give it four out of five fleur de lis!