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Summary
Summary
Cross Veronica Mars with MTV's Daria, and you'll get Scarlett Epstein, the snarky, judgmental, and often hilarious star of Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here , a witty and heartwarming novel that's perfect for fans of David Arnold's Mosquitoland and Kody Keplinger's The Duff.
Meet Scarlett Epstein, BNF (Big Name Fan) in her online community of fanfiction writers, world-class nobody at Melville High. Her best (read- only) IRL friends are Avery, a painfully shy and annoyingly attractive bookworm, and Ruth, her pot-smoking, possibly insane seventy-three-year-old neighbor.
When Scarlett's beloved TV show is canceled and her longtime crush, Gideon, is sucked out of her orbit and into the dark and distant world of Populars, Scarlett turns to the fanfic message boards for comfort. This time, though, her subjects aren't the swoon-worthy stars of her fave series-they're the real-life kids from her high school.Scarlett never considers what might happen if they were to find out what she truly thinks about them...until a dramatic series of events exposes a very different reality than Scarlett's stories, forever transforming her approach to relationships-both online and off.
'A sparkling, unabashedly feminist debut.' Kirkus Reviews ,Starred Review
'A perfect match for fans of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl .' Booklist
Author Notes
Anna Breslaw is a writer whose work have appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Jezebel, and the Guardian. Her first novel, Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here, was published in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-High school junior Scarlett is heavily involved with the Lycanthrope High TV show's online fandom, writing fan fiction and live tweeting the show. In real life, she is mostly invisible, hanging out with her supersmart best friend, Avery, and her elderly neighbor Ruth. When her favorite show is canceled, Scarlett and her online friends are devastated. And then her real life starts falling apart. The teen begins writing new fanfic, set in the Lycanthrope High world but based on events and people in the real world. She does not paint the most flattering portraits of them, so when her writing is discovered by people in her school, there are serious consequences. The initial impression of the book is of a quippy, good-time read. But as Scarlett's life takes a dive, the tone darkens. Breslaw includes Scarlett's fanfic, which is engaging to read, especially when she is stymied and writing in terrible clichés. Unfortunately, while the inclusion of the protagonist's work and Tumblr-speak feels fresh, many of the main ideas do not: a smart, pretty girl hiding her light; a rough-around-the-edges single mom with a heart of gold; an absent dad with a perfect new family; and a mean girl who is not so mean. The book feels uneven and loses steam toward the end, but it is a quick read that is still enjoyable. An abundance of scenes with teens drinking casually make this title more appropriate for high schoolers. VERDICT A fine additional purchase.-Geri Diorio, Ridgefield Library, CT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
After Scarlett's favorite TV show, Lycanthrope High, is canceled, the 15-year-old, who is deeply involved in an online fan-fiction community for the series, navigates her frustrations and real-life woes by creating a new spin-off story. She casts her nemesis, Ashley, as a robot drone and her crush, Gideon, as her love interest. Inevitably, worlds collide when Scarlett's fan fiction gets leaked, and she has to face up to reality. Scarlett's voice is smart and witty, laced with snarky pop-culture references and crackling one-liners à la Gilmore Girls ("Even after nine years of torture, though, Ashley's prettiness still stuns me like a manta ray... as if God designed her to provide a believable photo for catfishing people"). Like her beloved Lycanthrope High, Scarlett's story features a "diverse cast of wisecracking misfits" (Scarlett herself has a Jewish and Mexican background), respects its teenage audience, and perhaps cuts off too soon. As in Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, excerpts from Scarlett's fan fiction appear throughout, further highlighting the sharp-edged humor and questionable decision-making that make her such an entertaining narrator. Ages 12-up. Agent: Tina Wexler, ICM. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A self-described "dorky virgin" from a crushingly boring Central Jersey suburb, Scarlett Epstein feels both socially inferior and intellectually superior to everyone around her. White, Jewish Scarlett's grown up eating subsidized lunches at school, and her mother cleans the bathrooms of other kids' houses, so the chip on her shoulder after years of slights is Montana-sized. She handles it by affecting an often hilarious, sarcastic distance, turning her hand-me-downs into an aesthetic choice, and liberally peppering her conversation with both popular and obscure cultural references. As a prominent member of a fandom obsessing over the recently canceled supernatural teen drama Lycanthrope High, Scarlett's social life mostly takes place online, and she uses her popular fan fiction series to process her feelings and experiences. Though her life is full of good peopleher mother, her best friend, Avery, her delightfully vinegary neighbor Ruthwho hold up loving mirrors to her most judgmental, emotionally distancing impulses, Scarlett stubbornly sees herself as an underachieving loner with a uniquely sophisticated read on the world. Thanks in part to glimpses of her autobiographical fics, serialized within the main narrative, readers will quickly see what Scarlett doesn't: that she pushes people away, that her underachievement is a pose, that she's often thoughtlessly cruel and self-absorbed, and that's she's worth rooting for anyway. A sparkling, unabashedly feminist debut. (Fiction. 13-17) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
When Lycanthrope High goes off the air, Scarlett loses more than just an hour of television. Deeply emotionally involved in the cult-hit show, Scarlett was one of its top fanfiction writers. Despite one good friend and one longtime crush IRL, Scarlett lives for her connection with fellow BNFs (Big Name Fans). Now, Scarlett is so devastated that even her fic-writer friends suggest she get a life. In response, Scarlett attempts to talk to her crush, Gideon, who was her childhood soul mate, and . . . it goes all wrong. Instead, Gideon ends up with mean girl Ashley. But Scarlett finds release for her frustrations in creating a new fiction featuring a callow lad, Gideon, who's accompanied by shapely automaton Ashbot. Scarlett is very funny, and her first-person narration is full of snappy literary and cultural references that will endear her to readers. But Breslaw doesn't allow her heroine to hide behind her wit. Eventually, Scarlett begins to truly see the pain and beauty of reality. A perfect match for fans of Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl (2013).--Colson, Diane Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CERTAIN GROWN-UPS REVEL in dumb generalizations about young adult literature. They say that Y.A. lacks moral ambiguity; that it is too dark; that it doesn't depict empowered female sexuality; that it is populated by fields of sparkly vampires; that it sprang fully formed from the head of John Green. Nice try, reductive grown-ups. The only overarching thing that characterizes young adult literature is the age of the protagonist. Y.A. is sometimes fluffy, sometimes fanged, sometimes hot, sometimes cool. Its writers' voices are punk rock and hip-hop and symphonic and fizzy-poppy. As these summer fiction possibilities prove, Y.A. books can be as different from one another as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is from Blind Lemon Jefferson. Let's start our "there are more things in heaven and earth" exploration with EVERY EXQUISITE THING (Little, Brown, $17.99), by Matthew Quick, the author of "The Silver Linings Playbook." It's about Nanette, a high school junior whose suburban, conformist life is blown wide open after she reads an out-of-print coming-of-age novel called "The Bubblegum Reaper." Soon she's hanging out with its reclusive author, Nigel Booker, and a teenage boy named Alex who's a fellow Booker acolyte. Nanette starts reading Bukowski and Philip Larkin, rebelling against her shallow parents, tossing away her soccer stardom because she has come to hate the game, and falling in love. But before long her life starts sliding out of control. "Every Exquisite Thing" is guilty of the "not like other girls" trope - the notion that while most girls are predictable and icky, this one has complex dreams and emotions that make her special. And since the other girls in "Every Exquisite Thing" are vapid, undifferentiated, peach-schnapps-swilling sexpots, no wonder Nanette is a singular creation who'd rather hang with dudes who tell her to read dude authors. The plots of "Every Exquisite Thing" and "The Bubblegum Reaper" parallel each other; both are about ambiguity and not being able to look to adults or convention for guidance on how to live a meaningful life. But Quick sometimes seems to mock Nanette's pain and pretensions in away that feels meanspirited. "I like listening to music and reading poetry and novels," she tells her friend Shannon. "I like seeing art house films. I like having philosophical discussions as I look up at a hunter's moon." Shannon replies, "Maybe you're just a snob, Nanette." Maybe she is. But the universe Quick has built for her doesn't offer an alternative. By the time I finished reading "Every Exquisite Thing" (the title is from "The Picture of Dorian Gray": "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic"), my shoulders were somewhere around my upper ears. AS I read SCARLETT EPSTEIN HATES IT HERE (Razorbill/Penguin, $17.99), by Anna Breslaw, they inched back down. Scarlett has female friends who are smart and kind. She's a writer of fan fiction, so she doesn't treat canonical texts as gospel. Her stories are rooted in a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"-esque TV show about a boarding school in which half the students are werewolves. But after the show ends, she begins a new narrative based on the lives of her friends, her nemeses and her crush object, Gideon. Unlike Nanette, Scarlett is self-aware and mouthy, snarkily alert to the class divide in her suburban New Jersey town, where her family can't afford all the extras her classmates take for granted and she is used to being made fun of "for wearing thrift-store clothes (they weren't cool yet), bringing weird wholesale Sam's Club chocolate milk to lunch unlike everybody else's normal Nesquiks, and the million other tiny indicators kids can sniff out poorness with." She adores her best friend, Ave, but wishes Ave were more assertive. "If Ave had invented fire, she'd introduce it to the Cro-Magnons by whispering, 'Um, hey, I made this thing, it's kinda cool, it might be sorta helpful for our continued evolution, if that makes any sense.'" Scarlett is annoyed at herself for her crush on Gideon, who acts like a jerk with the popular boys instead of living his best life as the stand-up-comedy nerd he is in his soul. When Scarlett sees him in school the day after he and his posse have trashed her feminist, pot-smoking neighbor's garden, she has no idea what to say. "I freeze helplessly, torn between wanting to yell at him about his cisgender white male sense of entitlement and whisper to him that he smells like pine needles and dreams." Relatable. Alas, many of Scarlett's references don't sound very kidlike ("Glengarry Glen Ross"? "The Wire"? Reclaimed-wood tables? Flipping through Redbook in a waiting room?), and the plot is, to be charitable, shaky. A character dies solely to advance the protagonist's emotional arc. Feh. But Scarlett's goofy, cranky voice is fun nonetheless. Her story is writ small. THE SERPENT KING (Crown, $17.99), a debut by Jeff Zentner, on the other hand, is an ambitious, sui generis genre mash-up. The three main characters, who live in rural Tennessee, seem to come from three kinds of literature: Dill, with his snake-handling fundamentalist preacher father - currently incarcerated for possession of child pornography - and fearful, quietly manipulative mother, is straight out of Southern Gothic. His parents don't want him to go to college (his mother wants him to drop out of high school and make money), and with his soulful guitar playing, self-doubt and yearning, you ache for him to find his way into a different story. Lydia is a smart-mouthed fashionista and power blogger whose spiky voice is so well executed she could text with Scarlett. Travis is a lumbering, black-clad, dragon-pendant-wearing, staff-carrying guy who lives through his passion for a George R. R. Martin-style fantasy world. Zentner's great achievement - particularly impressive for a first novel - is to make us believe three such different people could be friends. He also manages to blend a dank, oppressive, Flannery O'Connor-esque sense of place with humor and optimism. I particularly looked forward to Travis's passionate narration as he pretends he's in the "Game of Thrones"-like world. (Having dinner at Lydia's well-stocked house, he composes in his head: "The harvest was good that year in Raynar Northbrook's lands, and they feasted often on the heavy oaken table that sat in his great hall. He called for bread and meat until he was sated.") The characters narrate their own chapters, which makes for some wild shifts in tone. The unredeemable monstrousness of Dill's and Travis's fathers may prove hard for some readers to take, and a senseless, drug-fueled tragedy may seem over the top. But I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another. Mariko Tamaki's SAVING MONTGOMERY SOLE (Roaring Brook, $17.99) is also about three friends, but it's far less wrenching to read. Montgomery and her friends Naoki and Thomas constitute the Jefferson High Mystery Club in Aunty, Calif. They hang out after school and discuss strange phenomena. One day Monty spots an online ad for the "Eye of Know," a mystical crystal amulet from an actual meteorite, on sale for only $5.99. She buys it, and unnerving things start to happen. The book's vivid California-ness - avocado trees and warm air and concrete - along with Thomas's out-and-proud gayness ("Remember we are orchids in a forest of carnations," he texts) and Naoki's sparkly air-sprite energy reminded me a bit of Francesca Lia Block's classic '90s Y.A. novel "Weetzie Bat." But Monty's voice is far more sardonic than Weetzie's. "The sky was that pulsing electric blue that it is here," she writes. "It's this unforgettable, I'm-so-blue-it-hurts blue that I've always found kind of ridiculous. It's blue like nail polish for club kids. Anyway, today I wasn't really minding it." "Saving Montgomery Sole" has the assured tone and meandering plot of Tamaki's strange and lovely graphic novel "This One Summer" (illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, who is her cousin and the illustrator of the Book Review's By the Book feature). Both books deal with inchoate rage and anxiety. Monty loves her two moms and her friends, but the presence of a homophobic right-wing preacher in town has her on edge, and being surrounded by teenagers who aren't as enlightened as her immediate circle makes her furious. "I could feel my brain filling up with angry bits, piling up like Ho Ho wrappers on a binge day," she says. "Like homework on a Sunday." There's no big revelation, no epiphany. The mystery of the amulet is never solved. Readers who find this maddening are not the right readers for this book. Readers who do not like human effluvia are not the right readers for THE HATERS (Amulet Books, $18.95). I must impress upon you how profane, vile and hilarious this book is. I laughed so hard I scared my cat off the couch multiple times, but if you have ever used the phrase "the coarsening of discourse," it is not for you. It's by Jesse Andrews, the author of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," which also had gross moments, but not this gross, and there was a dying girl, so the gross seemed in service of something noble. Not this time. "The Haters" is about Wes, Corey and Ash, who meet at jazz camp, start a band and flee on a long and filthy road trip. The depiction of jazz camp - with its hypercompetitive, fedora-wearing, skinny white guys trying to talk like Miles Davis - slays. One guy starts chatting up Wes, who was adopted from Venezuela, and when Wes asks him to stop talking like that, he says: "'Well, this is how I talk with the brothers back in South Philly. And they've never had a problem with it. But if you have a problem, man. ...' He nodded slowly. 'Then I got to thank you,' he said. 'For speaking your truth.'" It's clear why our heroes have to escape jazz camp. The three play in dives and eat junk food (the beef-flavored chips "had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs") and sleep wherever they can ("Motel 6 is where you go if you've been evicted from your home and you need a place to do the meth that you just stole from the corpse of a prostitute," Ash pronounces) and meet lovely and scary people and have romantic interludes. What "The Haters" excels at is describing music. Here's how Andrews captures terrible improv jazz: "The trombones were botching goofball quotations like 'Flight of the Bumble-bee' and then signaling surrender with sheepish atonal elephant noises. And each of the saxophone solos was basically the equivalent of the small talk that you are forced to make with the friend of your mom who cuts your hair." And, helpfully for many readers, "if you don't know music, just know that if the band is playing in F but you're playing in E, it's going to sound simultaneously very whimsical and very horrible. It's basically a horror movie starring the Muppets." What "The Haters" does not excel at is girls. Ash is, shall we say, a poorly developed character. And there's a scene in which she is uncomfortably in the room while a comic-relief white hippie girl has several rounds of sex with a semiconscious Wes. (In the morning, when Wes is sober, Ash tells him, "You were just lying there murmuring, Please, no, and she was ordering you around in broken Spanish.") Not funny. But a lot in the book is. From the gross to the celestial: THE SQUARE ROOT OF SUMMER (Roaring Brook, $17.99), a debut by Harriet Reuter Hapgood, is a story of love and grief grounded in physics. Gottie Oppenheimer is a math and science genius in a small seaside town in Norfolk, England. Her mom died when she was born; now she's mourning her grandfather Grey's unexpected death. Her best friend, Thomas, who moved to Canada five years earlier, is coming back. She has strange gaps in her memory. And she starts experiencing disruptions in time and space. This is a novel for readers unafraid of science. There's talk of fractals, wormholes, black holes, the Gödel metric ("a solution to the E=MC^sup 2^ equation that 'proves' the past still exists"), Schrödinger's cat, string theory. Physics provides metaphors for loss, confusion and love. But there's humor, too, including terrible band names (Gottie's brother is a glam rocker) worthy of "The Haters": Fingerband, Synthmoan de Beauvoir, Jurassic Parkas. There are funny German words and delicious baked goods and crazy outfits. And Thomas is wonderful. When he tells Gottie how sorry he is about Grey's death, "it's the first time someone's hugged me since Oma and Opa, at Christmas. I stand there, made out of elbows. ... But after a moment, I wrap myself around him. It's a hug like warm cinnamon cake, and I sink into it." Later: "His kiss interrupts me, sudden-short-sweet. Unquestionable. It feels like reading a favorite book, and falling for the ending even though you already know what happens." The book is too long and has entirely too many physics analogies. But the delectable romance and the moment when past, present and future all come together and semi-solve the mysteries of Gottie's time travel make the journey worthwhile. Nothing about Julie Berry's THE PASSION OF DOLSSA (Viking, $18.99) should work. It is a 500-page book set in the 13th century, sprinkled with a medieval language called Old Provençal, about a young noblewoman who escapes a Dominican order that wants to burn her as a heretic. Yet I stayed up all night reading it and had tears in my eyes almost the entire time. Dolssa is an 18-year-old girl who has a Song of Songs-like relationship with God. "He caught me up on wings of light, and showed me the realms of his creation, the glittering gemstones paving his heaven," she says. "He left my body weak and spent, my spirit gorged with honey." The friars do not look kindly on this kind of talk. But Dolssa (miraculously?) escapes being thrown into the flames and winds up in the seaside village of Bajas. There she's cared for by three sisters who run a tavern and supplement their income by whoring (the oldest), fortunetelling (the youngest) and matchmaking (the middle sister). It turns out Dolssa can perform healing miracles. But an obsessed friar is tracking her through the countryside with near-sexual fixation, interviewing prostitutes as well as Jews and small-town clergymen about whether they've seen her. The language is gorgeous and evocative without seeming to try too hard. You practically smell the sea and taste the foamy ale. The characters have clearly differentiated voices; Dolssa sounds fancy and stilted for much of the book, while the sisters sound like the funny, earthy wenches they are. I cried partly because of the matter-of-fact kindness of the sisters - they care for others because it's the moral thing to do - and partly because of the parallels to our country now. There's a difference between being Christ-like and using Christ's name to oppress others, to silence women and persecute immigrants. I'm not sure how big an audience there is for a book like this. But I found it magnificent. Finally, we turn to another debut, THE STAR-TOUCHED QUEEN (St. Martin's Griffin, $18.99), by Roshani Chokshi, a fantasy drenched in Indian folklore. It's essentially a fairy tale, with a journey, an evil villain, minimal characterization and a happy ending. But lush, ornate ribbons of language are festooned over the bones of story, turning it into something rich and dizzying. Maya, a princess in Bharata, is rescued by a mysterious man named Amar. He smells of "mint and smoke, cardamom and wood." He can't tell Maya who he is until the new moon, but he's obviously trustworthy, because he says things like "I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams." He tells her, "Come with me and you shall be an empress with the moon for your throne and constellations to wear in your hair." My teenage-demigoth self would have swooned. Amar and Maya ride through magical settings to his empty castle. Mirrors reflect "countries spiked with spires, turrets bursting with small ivy flowers, cities awash in color, and a thousand skies painted in vespertine violets of anxious nightfall waiting for stars, dawns just barely blooming pink and orange with new light, afternoons presiding over sleeping towns. ... It was all here." You either have to let yourself be swept along or wind up doing an Amazon search to find out how many times the word "glittering" appears. (Fifteen.) I was troubled by grammatical errors: "Girl that" rather than "girl who; "with myself" rather than "with me"; "He sunk beneath the water." But who cares, if you're a reader who imagines being bathed in milk, adorned with amethysts and kissed by a gorgeous stranger who says: "I know your soul. Everything else is an ornament." MARJORIE INGALL is a columnist at Tablet and the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book "Mamaleh Knows Best."