Review: The Manifesto on How to be Interesting
13:55
By Holly Bourne
Source: Personal purchase, paperback
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Coming of Age,
Goodreads Synopsis:
Apparently I'm boring. A nobody. But that's all about to change. Because I am starting a project. Here. Now. For myself. And if you want to come along for the ride then you're very welcome.
Bree is a loser, a wannabe author who hides behind words. Most of the time she hates her life, her school, her never-there parents. So she writes.
But when she’s told she needs to start living a life worth writing about, The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting is born. Six steps on how to be interesting. Six steps that will see her infiltrate the popular set, fall in love with someone forbidden and make the biggest mistake of her life.
From the bestselling author of Soulmates comes a fearlessly frank take on school, cliques and crushes.
My review:
I picked up this book for 3 reasons:
- The cover is really cool, and the outside of the pages is neon orange
- It’s about blogging
- It seems similar to Mean Girls (who doesn’t love that film?)
I had really high hopes, because - obviously - it looks really good. It’s also UKYA, which made me want to love it even more.
I really liked this book. Bree was a great lead - she was real, and very relatable for practically everyone in high school. She got a bit annoying at the beginning, as she made bad decisions, and moped around a bit too much, but she wasn’t too bad. She was definitely what I was expecting.
Bree really developed through the book. She became much tougher at the end, and wasn’t as irritating. The thing I liked about her the most was that she stayed true to herself. Although she did go against what she would have done at the beginning of the book, it didn’t bother me because she was developing. The main thing that she did stay true to herself in was her guts - she was still as sharp-tongued as she was at the beginning, which I really enjoyed.
The plot was good. It wasn’t very original, but I didn’t really expect it to be. I knew where is was going, but I still enjoyed it a lot. The characters were all so unoriginal they actually made it original and much more readable, and the school setting was a really accurate representation. This book was quite addictive (as you can tell by the short amount of time it took me to read it).
One thing I really hated was the romance. It made me cringe so much, and the bit about “true love” just made me want to be sick. It was so cheesy and boring - I didn’t ship them at all, and in my opinion, they fell in love a bit too quickly. That bit definitely could have been cut out - the story would have been perfectly fine without it.
This book was obviously meant for teens to read, and for them to learn ‘important’ messages from it. This was really clear throughout the whole book, and in my opinion, it was a bit too blatantly obvious - if I knew I was going to learn something, I wouldn’t want to learn it!
One thing I definitely did learn is that you should trust your Mum. Bree’s mum helped her so much in this book - she was a really unique character, and made the whole book a lot better for me. She was so kind, and really helped Bree a lot, even if Bree didn’t quite see it.
Overall, this book was a really fun read. It was quick and easy, and taught us something too. This book gives a great name to UKYA!
My reaction:
Rating:
Hello! I'm D - a dog-loving feminist from the UK. You'll probably find me with my nose in a book or playing my clarinet
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