Teen Book Review: Girls Like Me by Lola Stvil

Title: Girls Like Me

Author: Lola Stvil

Publication Date: October 4th, 2016

Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers

Genre: YA

Pages: 320

ISBN: 0544706749

Source: Publisher

Rating:

Synopsis (from Publisher):

Fifteen-year-old Shay Summers is trying to cope with the death of her father, being overweight, and threats from a girl bully in school.  When she falls in love with Blake, a mysterious boy online, insecure Shay doesn't want to tell him who she is.   But with the help of her two best friends, as well as an assist by Kermit and Miss Piggy, ultimately Shay and Blake’s love prevails. 

     Girls Like Me is a fun and fresh poetic take on teen angst, social media and online anonymity, and high school romance.

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Lola Stvil was seven when she first came to this country from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She attended Columbia College in Chicago, where her main focus was creative writing. In addition to plays, she also writes screenplays and short stories.

She has been commissioned to write for ABC, CBS and Princeton University. She won the NAACP award for her play "The Bones of Lesser Men". In addition to being nominated for LA Weekly awards. Her work has also received positive reviews from The LA Times, Variety and LA Weekly. Guardians: The Girl was her first novel. Lola recently became A New York times and USA today Best selling Author.

This book is about a girl who’s life has turned upside down after her father passes away and she is left with her step-mother. She turns to a kind online person who she falls for in a hard way. Just to discover he is none other than Blake Harrison, the “King” of her high school. She struggles with being able to tell Blake who she is because she thinks she is a fat-girl who reads, writes, and thinks too much. The author mostly writes this book in a poem format, but also includes IM’s between Blake and Shay, the main character. Their main point was to make the reader interpret the poem and figure out how the characters are feeling. 

            The characters Shay and Blake commit to each other fairly quickly, they commit the dreaded insta-love. The story over all was a sweet story of self-discovery, but the details are not very realistic, in one scene someone in the book is just suddenly sent away to military school for no apparent reason. However, the book comes back into my good-graces by how the main character, Shay, thinks and feels because I can relate to her feelings of being scared to tell Blake who she is because of how she feels about herself. My definite least favorite character was Kelly because of how awful she treated Shay. My favorite character would definitely be Boots, one of Shay’s best friends, because of how sarcastic she is and how she tries to comfort and protect Shay when she is hurt even though Boots is hurting too because of the tumor she has. One of my favorite things about the book is the trust and tight knit circle of Shay, Boots, and Dash, her other best friends, they will always protect one another.

            I would recommend this book to someone just looking for a good, sappy, and happy contemporary. But those who don’t should probably steer away. This is also definitely for people who don’t mind mature themes.