Being Layla Hart

(Copy provided by NetGalley.)

From Goodreads: "April Collins is freaking out. She completely embarrassed herself in front of the most crushable guy in school. There’s no way she’s returning to school, like, EVER. Why can’t she be pretty, popular and perfect like Layla Hart? Layla is a phony online profile - that is, until April wakes up as her! Will popularity prove as easy as it seems? And what happens when April’s crush finally notices her…as Layla?"

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Being 14 is hard. I get it, I really do. Thankfully, I don't remember much about those years, but I'm pretty sure that they weren't much fun. Amanda McKelt manages to capture the tone and feel of being 14 perfectly while successfully weaving in A Moral without beating the reader over the head with it. Much.

That being said, there's capturing the voice of a 14-year-old and then there's screaming and twittering in the voice of a 14-year-old for 170 pages. That was a bit hard for me to read, so I ended up skimming a lot, and I don't feel like I missed much because I did. This was due in large part to the plot's utter predictability, the inexplicable magic that made things happen, and the stupidity of the people who should have been able to throw a monkey-wrench into the plot, i.e. April's mother. But no, dear Kath buys her daughter's inane story with hardly a flinch and exerts her parental authority not one whit. I despise parental characters who just let things happen without getting to the bottom of things. That's a parent's job! Not to play the role of innocent bystander. Innocent bystanders are not believable parents.

Rant over.

Anyway, the Moral is actually woven pretty well into the story. I think that if I were a tween, I would enjoy this book much more. But as an adult, well, it was a bit like revisiting childhood cartoons that make me cringe at my taste as a child. Very hard for me to read.

Gentle Reader Alert: I skimmed most of the book, so I don't truly know how heavy or easy it is on the swears. What I read was pretty clean.