I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Ratings4
Average rating2
15
Ratings4
Average rating2
From acclaimed author Gretchen McNeil comes her first realistic contemporary romance—perfect for fans of Kody Keplinger’s The Duff and Morgan Matson’s Since You've Been Gone. Beatrice Maria Estrella Giovannini has life all figured out. She's starting senior year at the top of her class, she’s a shoo-in for a scholarship to M.I.T., and she’s got a new boyfriend she’s crazy about. The only problem: All through high school Bea and her best friends Spencer and Gabe have been the targets of horrific bullying. So Bea uses her math skills to come up with The Formula, a 100% mathematically guaranteed path to social happiness in high school. Now Gabe is on his way to becoming Student Body President, and Spencer is finally getting his art noticed. But when her boyfriend Jesse dumps her for Toile, the quirky new girl at school, Bea realizes it's time to use The Formula for herself. She'll be reinvented as the eccentric and lovable Trixie—a quintessential manic pixie dream girl—in order to win Jesse back and beat new-girl Toile at her own game. Unfortunately, being a manic pixie dream girl isn't all it's cracked up to be, and “Trixie” is causing unexpected consequences for her friends. As The Formula begins to break down, can Bea find a way to reclaim her true identity and fix everything she's messed up? Or will the casualties of her manic pixie experiment go far deeper than she could possibly imagine?
Reviews with the most likes.
this book was honestly pretty annoying to read bc the main character was so unlikeable but the storyline was cute and it was fluff and i still enjoyed it.
Actual rating: 2.5 stars, rounded down
I really, really wanted to like this book. But guess what? The universe decided to conspire against me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
- First of all, this book isn't actually terrible. I mean, it features a very unique protagonist — a Filipino-American teenager, which is something you don't see a lot of in contemporary young adult fiction. Plus, it has a super interesting premise, which revolves around the manic-pixie-dream-girl trope, it's effects, possible connotations and the way it caters to the men around us.
- But here's the thing: it doesn't handle either of the two things I mentioned above very well. Right from the start, Bea is a hard protagonist to root for. I found her obliviousness and lack of good decision-making skills particularly grating, and I thought there was little to no nuance in it's supposed deconstruction of said trope. At times, the whole book just felt completely over the top and silly, in a way that made me cringe.
- And lastly, I really didn't appreciate the romantic “win the guy back” plot. I didn't understand what she saw in Jesse, I didn't understand what made her even want to bring Toile down ... which is probably why I spent the rest of the book going “whyyyyyy” as Bea tried to re-invent herself into the perfect girl, just to get him back.
But, of course, don't let this stop you from picking this book up >~< It's gotten loads of rave reviews + it's diverse (not a lot of problematic rep, as far as I saw), so you might enjoy it, as long as you approach it with the right sort of mindset!
