The Book: When "Perfect" Parker Fadley starts drinking at school and failing her classes, all of St. Peter's High goes on alert. How has the cheerleading captain, girlfriend of the most popular guy in school, consummate teacher's pet, and future valedictorian fallen so far from grace?
Parker doesn't want to talk about it. She'd just like to be left alone, to disappear, to be ignored. But her parents have placed her on suicide watch and her conselors are demanding the truth. Worse, there's a nice guy falling in love with her and he's making her feel things again when she'd really rather not be feeling anything at all.
Nobody would have guessed she'd turn out like this. But nobody knows the truth.
Something horrible has happened, and it just might be her fault. (From Goodreads)
My Feels: So I've been in a total book slump, and decided to pick up this book by Courtney Summers because 1.) I love her raw, writing style, and 2.) she always leaves me with a book hangover. Why it took me so long to pick this up since I loved ALL THE RAGE and SOME GIRLS ARE is beyond me, but I'm glad it was there to break my reading slump.
Okay. So my feels. At first, I wasn't sure I was going to like Parker. She's bitchy and completely unlikeable, and if I couldn't understand why she was like that or empathize with her, I knew I wouldn't make it through the whole book. But Summers has this talent for bringing to life the characters on the page, that they all seem familiar and completely real and imperfect. And within a couple of chapters, I found myself starting to relate to Parker (not completely, but enough to get hooked).
Perfection is something I dealt with constantly in high school. As a new student at a school where everyone knew each other since their diaper days, it was difficult for me to climb up the social ladder. It was only when things started to fall apart for me that I realized how stupid it all was and how miserable striving for perfection made me. That's what made this book so unflinchingly real, that I consumed it in one sitting (like all of Summers books).
If you aren't on the Summers bandwagon, I highly suggest you get on it pronto. You won't regret it. This one deals with the tough stuff: regret, identity, secrets, anxiety, suicide. There's no sugarcoating, and that's what I love about it.
