ARC Review: Fans of the Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa

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Fans of the Impossible Life
Series: None
Author: Kate Scelsa
Published September 10th 2015 by Macmillan Children's Books

Goodreads Synopsis
This is the story of a girl, her gay best friend, and the boy in love with both of them.
Ten months after her recurring depression landed her in the hospital, Mira is starting over as a new student at Saint Francis Prep. She promised her parents she would at least try to act like a normal, functioning human this time around, not a girl who sometimes can’t get out of bed for days on end, who only feels awake when she’s with Sebby.
Jeremy is the painfully shy art nerd at Saint Francis who’s been in self-imposed isolation after an incident that ruined his last year of school. When he sees Sebby for the first time across the school lawn it’s as if he’s been expecting this blond, lanky boy with a mischievous glint in his eye.
Sebby, Mira’s gay best friend, is a boy who seems to carry sunlight around with him like a backlit halo. Even as life in his foster home starts to take its toll, Sebby and Mira together craft a world of magic rituals and secret road trips, designed to fix the broken parts of their lives.
As Jeremy finds himself drawn into Sebby and Mira’s world, he begins to understand the secrets that they hide in order to protect themselves, to keep each other safe from those who don’t understand their quest to live for the impossible.
Goodreads

Review
I received an Advance Reader Copy from the publisher via NetGalley. This in no way impacted on my view.

Well, that was disappointing. Like most people, I was originally drawn in by the first line of the synopsis: 'This is the story of a girl, her gay best friend, and the boy in love with both of them.' However, the romance was not between the three characters, and was barely existence. What was there, between Sebby and Jeremy, was destructive, and not enjoyable at all - I wouldn't even say you could exactly call it a relationship.

I only finished reading this book last night, and already can't remember a lot of it. That is not what you want from a book. It was a book I forced myself to finish, and don't really understand why I didn't DNF it earlier. I wasn't bad in the sense that it was a chore to finish, rather, it was simply boring. Nothing kept my attention. Out of the various characters we met, Mira was one of the only ones I liked, and I felt she was brought down by Sebby, and was better on her own. Sebby was a character, who, for me, ruined the whole book. I never liked him from the get go, and everything he did made me sort of hate him a little more. If the book was just Mira and Jeremy, with their other friends, I might have enjoyed it a lot more.

I also had a majot problem with the format of the book. It was split between three PoV's (Mira, Sebby, and Jeremy), which normally wouldn't bother me. However, each one was in a different tense. The split between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tense was so choppy, and it ruined the reading experience. Like I've already said, if Mira and Jeremy were the only PoV's, it might not have been too bad. If this is Scelsa's writing style, then I'm sorry to say I won't be reading any more of her books.

Another thing that annoyed me, when I finished the book, was how many things weren't tied up, or answered? What's happening with Rose and Ali? Is Talia going to be punished? How does Peter fare? Do Mira and Julie get along now? etc., etc. I know you tend to get a lot of open-ended contemporary YAs these days, but this was just taking it too far. It seems a bit lazy, as if some of the plot points were just added for shock value, and nothing else.

Yeah, so this book was not for me. I understand that a lot of people enjoyed it, but I wasn't lucky enough. If you think you can cope with the issues I had, then be my guest, and I wish you luck.

Dates Read:
September 4-7, 2015

Rating
2 Stars