B itibaren Jiranpur, West Bengal 736134, India
I´d heard basically only great things about Sean Griswold´s Head, and I loved the idea, so I was really excited to read this one. However, I was pretty disappointed. I still love the idea - the whole thing with the Focus Object is hilarious and adorable, and that ended up being what I most enjoyed reading about; Sean´s head as Payton´s Focus Object, how that turns into romance, etc. The romance is cute - I loved Payton and Sean together. The writing is good, too. I was especially impressed by Payton´s PFEs/journal entries - often, journal entries in books seem fake to me, but in Sean Griswold´s Head, they´re realistic, and Payton´s voice is authentic and funny. I know, this all sounds positive, and in the beginning, I did like this book, but after a while Payton got on my nerves. The characters are my main problem in this book. It´s not that they´re badly-written or anything like that, I just didn´t like them as people. At times I could relate to Payton, but most of the time she annoyed me - she´s so selfish and melodramatic! The way she reacts to finding out her dad has MS is strange - she doesn´t think at all about how it affects her dad, just about herself. I didn´t get Payton´s character - at times she´s the social-activist-type, then she´s a normal teenager thinking about unimportant stuff. She´s so patronizing of anyone who´s different from her, making fun of Sean for riding his bike to school and hating Sean´s friend because he only wears black. I didn´t get why she made the decisions she made, and I just couldn´t connect with her. Jac is just as annoying as Payton. She doesn´t care about what Payton´s feeling and says she shouldn´t make such a big deal out of her dad having MS because she didn´t lose him, and Jac did, because her parents are divorced and she never gets to see her dad. I couldn´t believe a friend would react like that - that is not the same thing at all, and it´s just not something you tell your best friend if she´s just found out her dad has MS. Payton and Jac´s friendhsip annoyed me - the entire time, they only think of their own problems and both tell the other one she´s being selfish - I wanted to sake them and make them see they´re exactly the same. That aspect really frustrated me. Sean is an okay character - at times he´s really sweet, but at others he´s patronizing, too, just like Jac and Payton. One thing I appreciated is that Payton´s dad has MS, not cancer. For some reason, the only ways people die in the books I read are form cancer or in car accidents, which has really gotten on my nerves. So, thank you, Lindsey Leavitt, for choosing a disease other than cancer. It was interesting to read about the disease, and it seemed well-researched and realistic. Well, I can´t be the judge of whether it realistically portrays MS, as I know little about it, but it seemed authentic. I know most of what I said in this review is negative, but I´m still giving it three stars - good writing, a pretty cute love story and a fun, original idea make this an okay read. It didn´t really work for me becuase I disliked the characters, and not connecting with the main character made it hard for me to get into the rest of the story, but whether or not you connect with a character is different for everyone, and I´ve read mainly good reviews of Sean Griswold´s Head, so maybe it´ll work for you. Reviewed at http://www.paperbacktreasures.blogspo...
Oh, wow, this book was fantastic! Unfortunately I was meant to be reading it with a very good friend here on GR and oops, I got carried away and started/finished before I should have (sorry, Jeremy). But once I picked this book up I was loathe to put it down. Thank you ScottK for loving this book so much and talking about it, you've now started me on a weird and wonderful ride with Repairman Jack. This series is quite a long one so I had better get to purchasing those books.