Monday, November 6, 2017

Book Review: 'Fans of the Impossible Life' by Kate Scelsa

"We were three bodies that didn't know the end of each other, breathing together. We knew that we would have to go back. Kick off the leaves and become three separate people who would go off into the world, forced to breathe on our own. But not yet. Not quite yet."

Part of me wanted to just give this book 3 stars and say, "Meh, not bad, not great." Because, I have to admit, Fans of the Impossible Life is slow to start. Contemporary YA books of its kind don't usually take about 100 pages for me to become fully invested, but this one did. I don't think that necessarily has to be a bad thing, but the beginning was slow and it was at least 100 pages before I had become invested in these characters and/or fell in love with them, y'know, the usual.

Fans of the Impossible Life is about three high school students: Mira, Jeremy and Sebby, who are all dealing with their own problems before their three-way friendship begins. Mira, who is trying to start over at St. Francis Prep and convince her parents that she can be a functional human being, only feels alive and worthwhile when she is with Sebby. Enter Jeremy: a shy art nerd who is only looking for random signatures in order to grant extra time in the art studio after school. Before long, Mira and Sebby (a gay foster kid who doesn't feel like he belongs anywhere) have taken Jeremy under their wing. Not to mention Jeremy has fallen hard for Sebby. Hard. But all they're trying to do is survive, and live the better life: the impossible life. There's also their friend Rose, who is constantly breaking up and making up with her girlfriend, Ali.

This book does have a great deal of strong points: it does the LGBT elements very well (it also has a very nice portrait of gay parenthood), the characters and their "typical" problems do end up being very relatable (especially the elements of teen depression, which continues to be misunderstood), as well as Sebby's painful story as a foster kid. Jeremy being an introverted gay boy also hit home, very much so. It is also very well written: there are some passages (such as the one above) that are worthy of being copied into a notebook.

However, despite having its fair share of strong points, my main issue with Fans of the Impossible Life is that I feel like the author tried a bit too hard to make this her own version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower: the back cover even promotes it as perfect for fans of that book, which a lot of YA novels do, but Fans of the Impossible Life's similarities to The Perks of Being a Wallflower (or the outsider humor element in Mean Girls, for that matter) borders on cliché and unoriginal. I don't wanna say the whole book is cliché and unoriginal, because there were a lot of parts that were in fact original and heartfelt (Sebby being a gay foster kid was something I'd never seen in a YA book before, so that story was nice to see), but there were points when I was reading where I was like, um, this is almost a perfect copycat of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. C'mon, you can do better. And I feel like the second half of the book does make up for the clichés in the first half, but it is worth mentioning that it does feel like The Perks of Being a Wallflower more than influenced this book: at times, it does feel like a copycat.

A lot of readers online were upset with the ending of Fans of the Impossible Life, because it's very open-ended. But, honestly, I think with everything that goes down, the ending had to be open-ended. You don't necessarily heal from depression; you can get better and have a good period, but it's still there, so Mira's ending is good in that regard. I feel like people were upset mostly because of Sebby's ending, which I think was done perfectly, given everything that happens. If you like YA books with nice queer characters and elements, I recommend. I think there are a few things that hold it back from being totally perfect, but cute and enjoyable nonetheless. 4/5 stars.

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