Review: Someone to Love by Melissa de la Cruz
SYNOPSIS:
Constantly in the spotlight thanks to her politician father’s rising star, Olivia Blakely feels the pressure to be perfect. As the youngest girl in her class, she tries hard to keep up and to seem mature to the older boy she’s crushing on, even as she catches his eye. But the need to look good on camera and at school soon grows into an all-consuming struggle with bulimia.
As Liv works toward her goal of gaining early admission to art school, including taking part in an upcoming student show, her life spirals out of control. Swept up in demands to do more than she’s ready for, to always look perfect and to succeed, Liv doesn’t know who she is anymore. It will take nearly losing her best friend and even her life for Liv to learn that loving herself is far more important than earning the world’s approval.
REVIEW:
*Book Received in Exchange for Honest Opinion/Review*
I wanted to fall madly in love with this book…but alas I couldn’t. I have been reading Melissa de la Cruz since she published her Blue Blood Series, way back in the day. So I thought this book would be a slam dunk but the topic of an eating disorder is dangerous water to tread in. The reason is, as someone who once struggled with one, I find authors have a hard time accurately portraying the internal struggles and it usually ends quickly with things wrapped up in a nice little bow.
That same thing happened here, Liv is struggling with her bulimia and the story constantly discusses how she counts calories, but then she frequently drinks to take the edge off her hunger. In my disorder and recovery, we count those as empty calories, alcohol isn’t calorie free. Liv just didn’t go there for me as a character, while she seemed to go through the motions and struggles in her eating disorder, she isn’t there emotionally. I wanted to be in her mind and feel the melt down, the disappoint, and the guilt but she never reaches that emotional level where we connected.
I feel that this might largely be in part to the fact that if you have never had an eating disorder, you simply don’t understand it. But also the fact that there were so many micro-stories and characters in the plot line that it over shadowed Liv’s story. Liv is in high school in all AP classes but she hardly ever does homework. Liv is struggling to get to her goal weight, but I don’t even know how tall she is until the end of the story…honestly, how can I know if a weight is extreme or not, 100 pounds on someone who is 5′ tall versus 6′ tall is very different.
Its the little things like this that leave me feeling disconnected. While the story wasn’t bad, it was simply meh. The ending was way too quick, I wanted to hear her therapy session, I wanted to see her eating, and there was not a single mention of purging after people find out about her bulimia. This was extremely disappointing, Melissa could have been the movement to normalize these sorts of things but she glides over them. In the end, I finished the read but its not something I will ever pick up again…and I can’t say I would recommend it either.
LINKS:
Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes and Noble
