Last night I was up way too late finishing “The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet,” by Stephanie Morrill. It was an excellent book that I highly recommend, a model for the friendship / relationship / coming-of-age genre of young-adult books. (One of the reasons I read it was in hopes I could learn how to do as well as Stephanie has.) The book brings together multiple challenges of young adulthood – finding your voice, being honest with yourself and others, dealing with dating for the first time, and what to do when your group of friends breaks down.
The main character is Ellie, whose flaw is a tendency to withdraw from others. That’s a perfectly healthy thing to do when you’re 16 and your friends are getting into drugs and other high-risk behavior, but Ellie creates a whole alternate world, writing a novel about a love triangle in an Italian palace in the 1400s. She tells her parents and her friends she has too much homework so she can write her secret book and try to find an agent for it, and she uses her issues with her friends to create rival characters in the historical fiction novel. There’s really nothing wrong with this secret world Ellie has created, but this being a YA novel, the secret world and the real world are eventually going to crash together and when they do, Ellie’s in trouble.
The main plot of this book is a love triangle. Ellie, who’s never dated before or kissed anyone, suddenly has two handsome boys interested in her. One’s pompous and preppy, and the other’s rough around the edges and gets into fights and gets DUIs. The subplots are about Ellie’s fraying connections with her friends, her efforts to market her novel, and learning to be herself in front of her parents and older brother.
I found the subplots about her family and friends to be the most interesting, especially as Ellie knows how to do the right thing but then goes a little too far in doing the right thing, offending her friends in the process. And when she’s on the outs with her friends, she says, fine I don’t need them anymore – and really means it, withdrawing further and further into the novel she’s writing.
The love-triangle main plot wasn’t my favorite, but then I’m male. I guess it did make me more aware of how challenging it is for a young woman to walk the line between wanting to stay connected with a boy who is interested in her without giving him the wrong impression, but I kept wanting to shout at the page, “just tell those boys to get themselves together and THEN call her!”
The publishing subplot, though, that got me all worked up because I’ve spent quite a bit of time fruitlessly pitching things to agents myself. Ellie is determined to both win the “Great Debut” new fiction contest and get her work accepted by a very good editor. I won’t give away the ending, but I was surprised it went as well as it did. I would have thought it would be quite a victory for Ellie to get a response to the effect of, “You’re a great writer but you’ve written the wrong book. Here’s some advice to do x, y, and z and then you’d have something we could work with.”
And then the publishing subplot made me all curious about the author’s path herself. This book was published under the imprint “Birch Tree” which seems to be a thing where self-published authors team up with each other. Stephanie’s most recent book, “Within These Lines,” is a historical fiction novel published by Blink, an imprint of HarperCollins. Stephanie started out self-published and got a commercial publisher to pick up a later novel. (Brief pause while I suppress my jealousy.) I thought it would be more realistic if Ellie’s path had gone a similar route.
The writing is excellent throughout, always giving me a clear insight into why Ellie is thinking the things that she is, and into how she’s drawn herself away from friends and family by overthinking things. The point where Ellie’s real story and fantasy story collide hit was a nice surprise. I was not expecting it. There are a few points where a little more copy editing would have helped, for example, on p. 174, Ellie gets a text from a boy during the day, and then in the next scene she’s talking to the boy and the first-person narrator says, “I snuggle deeper under the covers.” I thought that wow, that escalated fast. Their first time? It takes a while for the author to let you know it was a phone call.
One last minor criticism. This book is listed in seven different Amazon categories, all of them religious, but Ellie’s religion really isn’t explored much. She goes to church because she wants to be a good girl. She doesn’t party or drink. Okay, that’s nice, but why does she care about going to church, especially when there’s hardly anyone her age at church? I know authors don’t want to get too specific about church denominations because that’ll turn off readers from the other denominations, but Ellie needed to say something about how church grounded her.
All in all, it’s a good read that’s breezy and enjoyable as it moves along, a model for the genre, and a perfect gift for any young person.
Have you read The Revised Life of Ellie Sweet? What did you think? Don’t be shy, we need comments!
