The quick cut: A teen girl who was raised to be perfectly polite finds her life rocked when a freak storm knocks the power out and truths are revealed.
A real review:
Thank you to Feiwel & Friends for providing the arc for an honest review.
The pressure to reflect the correct image of yourself can be intense, especially as a teenager. Parents, teachers, and adults love pointing out how important it can be when you're deciding how you want to live your life. For Jessa, though, this pressure is an actual risk to her life.
Jessa has spent her life trying to be the perfect girl: always patient and kind, good grades, and a strict rule follower. So when her parents leave her home alone overnight, they allow her to have her closest friends stay over for a sleepover. Sounds innocuous enough right? But when a freak storm knocks out power and they're forced to venture out in the dark for help, unexpected dangers threaten their lives. Can Jessa shed her perfect image long enough to survive?
I adore the concept behind this book because I do think it's timely. We'd love to think that society today is more wise to how gender specific pressures can only create issues, but the reality is that it's still a problem. For whatever reason, the expectation for girls to be pretty and polite and perfectly imaged still happens far too often. Life is messy, so why tell someone they need to pretend that isn't true? It creates so much unnecessary emotional trauma.
That being said, this book did have some rough patches. I love the fast pace of the overall book. When the plot twist is revealed though, it switches into overdrive and doesn't take enough time to really play out. The result is that it feels like someone slapped the ending of a different book onto this one. A longer transition and reveal of details was needed here.
I am far from perfect and so is Jessa. I do relate to her struggle though. At her age, I felt like I had to be that way too and be the daughter my parents needed me to be. Seeing events force her to face who she really is and be that instead is an important one. It's a storyline a lot of readers can relate to: be yourself instead the person others expect you to be.
A fun horror story with an unevenly paced plotline.
My rating: 4 out of 5
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