Analee, in Real Life

June 1, 2018

Gr 9 Up-Analee is a 16-year-old girl from Florida, but she feels more comfortable being Kiri the Night Elf Hunter in her online role-playing game. She uses these games and her virtual crush to hide from reality-primarily the grief from losing her mother, the conflicting emotions of her father remarrying, and the confusion about a riff with her best friend. That is, until she becomes lab partners with the star soccer player and school heartthrob, Sebastian. What starts as mutual silence turns into an unlikely friendship. This coming-of-age story boasts a refreshing revelation at the end, dissecting complicated themes through quirky humor and the occasional fun list. Analee is a fully developed protagonist who learns how to face the challenges in her life. Sebastian encourages her growth but remains stuck in his own cycle, unable to overcome his personal hang-ups. Analee's family members do not change over the course of the novel, but she learns from their personalities and actions. It is through these stagnant secondary characters that she is able to come out of her shell and begin to understand her own emotions. VERDICT An entertaining novel for all teen collections.-Haley Amendt, Hinton Municipal Library, Alta.

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018
A genuinely fresh spin on Pygmalion in high school.Cuban-American Analee prefers to spend her time online, avoiding her feelings and absorbed in a role-playing game and chatting with a boy named Harris, whom she's never met in person (she lives in Florida and he is in Seattle). Her desire to stay away from the real world only gets greater when her father announces that he and his girlfriend of 11 months, a hippie named Harlow, are engaged. This is difficult for Analee to accept, in part because she is still grieving the death of her mother a few years earlier. As if that isn't enough, Analee is forced to become lab partners with Seb, a member of the popular crew at school that sees Analee as a loser--and that also includes her ex-best friend, Lily. As they get to know each other, Seb and Analee become not friends but fake boyfriend and girlfriend so that Seb can make his ex-girlfriend Chloe jealous. What follows is what you'd expect in any romantic comedy, all leading up to every romantic comedy's classic point of climax--a wedding. The familiarity of the setup and plot doesn't mean the writing and characters aren't authentic and multilayered. The novel is funny and affecting, well-balanced, and simply fun. The supporting cast of characters is racially diverse.A romantic comedy that reminds readers why the genre has such lasting appeal. (Fiction. 14-18)

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