(This is what it looks like when I graduate from college and I finally come off hiatus with my reviews!)

 

Anyway, so it’s been about a year and a half since I finished this book, which is shameful, I know. Unfortunately, my notes while reading this were not spectacular, so I will not be going into a lot of detail with my review here. I did enjoy The Fine Art of Truth or Dare, but I suppose one of the tests of how good a book is is how much you can recall its story and characters long after it’s over. The Fine Art of Truth or Dare has not really kept its place in my head very clearly, which is one of the reasons I didn’t give it a perfect rating. It was fairly average in storyline and character development, so it’s easily forgettable. (To be honest, I don’t remember the “truth or dare” part of this at all, which does not bode well for the memorability of this story.)

 

The Fine Art of Truth or Dare is about a girl named Ella who is obsessed with an old artist named Edward Willing—and I do mean obsessed. Although I completely understand her fascination with a long-dead artist, it took up way too much of the plot. I felt like more time was spent on uncovering the true life of Edward Willing than on Ella’s budding relationship with Alex. It’s not that I thought it made Ella unrealistic or I didn’t think it was interesting—I’d been going through similar experiences with one of my long-dead idols, Edgar Allan Poe, discovering his life was not quite the dramatic tragedy I’d wanted it to be—but it didn’t have a place in this particular story. It made it terribly difficult to root for the main couple of the novel when so much time was spent away from the characters’ interactions together.

 

That being said, I obviously still enjoyed the book quite a bit, and I think I would read it again someday. Ella’s friends, Sadie and Frankie, are so wonderfully written, and I found myself relating much more to Sadie than Ella, hahah. Ella’s self-consciousness and fears about liking someone who seems so far above her will be relatable to many teenagers who have felt inadequate while having a crush. The whole narration was certainly much better than many young adult novels out there right now, and it’s good if you’re looking for something light-hearted, but done fairly well.

 

See the full thing on my blog!

http://thaliasbooks.tumblr.com/post/158082101922/the-fine-art-of-truth-or-dare-review

I am still trying to figure out what I thought about this one - and I can't put it on either the love it or hate it list. I'm just a big ball of meh.

 

It think the main problem is that it didn't know what it wanted to be. Did it want to be Ella coming to terms with her scarring? Or Ella's realizations regarding illusion versus reality? It wanted to be both and didn't quite manage to do them both effectively. Throw in family dynamics, friend dynamics, and a host of secondary characters that are more like mannequins and...yeah.

 

I wanted to love Alex and Ella together but every time we got close, chapters of fake history about a fake painter...and totally pulled me out of the story.

 

I will give her this much - she pretty much nailed the dynamics around an Italian family. Whenever the Marino clan was together, it was like being back at Grandma's house for Thanksgiving.

3.5Review to come

For more book reviews, check out Books For YA!The only reason why I read this book is because of it's blurb and how it was compared to Anna and the French Kiss. But as I read the story further, I didn't see anything in it that resembled Anna and the French Kiss which really disappointed me because you know how I love AFK. But anyway, I wouldn't review this book base on the misleading blurb but on the impression of the story to me.TFAoTD is a cute story of an "invisible" girl and a popular jock. Fiorella is funny and cute but I find it hard to connect to her character because of her weird conversations with Edward Willing. I'm sometimes confused if this is contemporary or paranormal fantasy because of it. Alex was okay but I'm not swooned by his charisma. Those are the two main characters which in my opinion, are a bit weak in "ompf" factor. The only character that shine for me in this book is Frankie and Daniel. They just have that kind of personality and presence that you can't easily ignore or forget.The only thing that I didn't like about this book is that it has a lot of French dialogues that doesn't have an English translation. It's a bit of an inconvenience to some people who doesn't have any background on French like me because we have to translate it first in order for us to know what they said, which is a big waste of time and energy on our part. That's my only complain about this book.Overall, it was a nice book. If you like arts, French and sweet love story, check out this book.

So the cover has a quote from Robin Palmer that states, "Funny and sweet, just like first love ought to be." I kinda wonder if we read the same book. There was no part where I laughed because I thought something was funny. I didn't smile. I didn't even smirk. Also, if that really is how first love is supposed to be, then that is really sad.

Expectations aside thanks to the book cover, the book in itself wasn't terrible. There were a couple of ideas I liked. I liked that Ella pursued art to the point that she wanted to find out more about her favourite artist. I liked her friends Sadie and Frankie. Their group dynamic was balanced and did reflect one of three best friends who were there for each other while being individuals too. I particularly liked Frankie who could be very snarky but had a soft side too. He was an in your face kinda guy but Melissa Jensen managed to not make him seem way too much over the top.

Ella was obsessed with Edward Willing but had her reasons for liking his art. Since the plot aimed at realism, I would've very much preferred if she would've admitted from the outset that her conversations with him were imaginary. Or he should've been a ghost version of Edward. Would've been cliche but it would've made ploughing through pages and pages about a person who didn't matter to anyone else a little less laborious. She does abandon her obsession for a while to focus on Alex instead but the relationship between the two of them didn't help suck me into the book any further than whatever happened before Alex became central to the plot.

For something that I thought should've been a fairly easy read, I thought the plot was unnecessarily long. The constant emphasis on stating truth in the manner of "Truth: Insert a supposedly truthful statement." also made reading for me a somewhat stilted affair. To some degree I only read from cover to cover because in principle I try to finish books I start, unless I cannot stop cringing. I didn't cringe a lot while reading but neither did I derive much enjoyment. Would've given 2.5 stars if I could but since I can't and don't think it deserves 3, I'm giving 2 stars for this.