Celeste ConwayCritiques

Unlovely was okay... The premise and the cover pulled me in, but all the darkness I expected just wasn't there. It was a story filled with mystery and intrigue, but lacked the character connection that I craved. The romance seemed distant and the horror aspect was a tad far fetched. I kept reading in hopes of a wow ending, but it was nothing like I expected. It was meh and weak. The intense build up was definitely short lived. I wouldn't recommend this book unless you are looking for a filler read to pass time.

In Buenos Aires, where her father is the legal attache at the U.S. Embassy, sixteen-years-old Tess falls in love and tries to live the fast and free life of her friends until she discovers the devastating consequences of ignoring rules.

This is a book I feel every child needs to read especially in their pre teens. This book explains what the media presents as ideal looks for men and women. The book explains the media's effects on teens such as eating disorders. In all reality, digital artists can change the picture by using an image editing program on the computer. This changes the looks of the celebrities to enhance color, weight loss, and perfectly glowing skin!

Tessa’s life changed when her family moved to Argentina. She met her new friends and fell in love with Lucient, the son of a French diplomat. Lucient changed as he went back from a trip from Rome with his mother. Tessa then learned that Lucient had an illness – mental illness. Soon, Lucient started to push Tessa away from his life without any explanation. Then Tessa found out why Lucient did that, and everything wasn’t the same. This book was probably about a young girl who had to face a few changes in her life. She started to hang around with the wrong people and fell in love with someone who is a bad influence to her.

I’m not sure what to say of this book. The writing was alright. Sadly, the plot was not. The beginning of the book was quite confusing. I wasn’t sure of what was happening to Tessa and her friends. The middle was a bit slow. But I can’t stop reading it because I expect something to happen. And it was towards the end when there’s finally something. It was really frustrating when a writer stashed everything important towards the ending.

I'm struggling with what to say about this book. It's not that it was bad, because it wasn't. It just wasn't that good. It was fine. There's a nice description for you, right?

All I can say is that there's nothing technically wrong with it. It was well-written (though my ARC did have a few disconcerting typos and formatting errors). I just failed to connect with Tessa and the rest of the characters in any significant way. I could sympathize with her, sure. But overall I didn't care what happened to her or Lucien. There were also these long passages about how incredible Lucien was. How Tessa finally mattered because he loved her. How deep, and profound, and artistic, and creative, and mysterious he was. It got to the point where I was like, okay, I get it. I understand why Tessa is attracted to Lucien. Can we move on now?

Maybe it is because I was never the girl who was drawn to the dark, repressed, or dangerous boy. I like my guys stable and clean cut. But Lucien just failed to do it for me. It was also slow. A long read for a short book and while the pace picks up as we neared the conclusion, at the end of the day, not much happened. I'm kind of disappointed.

Bottom line, some people may enjoy it—especially fans of contemporary YA fiction—but not me, so I can't recommend it to my readers.½

This is a perfect tween girl novel. Anna and her best friend Katy have always been close. Katy’s family includes an older brother with disabilities so severe that he is essentially a baby. Anna’s older brother is a fifteen year old genius on his way to Harvard. And the girls are graduating and moving on to middle school. This is a time of many changes and goodbyes – Katy’s older brother is institutionalized, the girls have a friend whose father has died, both girls are learning to let go of their childhoods. Conway writes sensitively and with compassion about what is happening to both Anna and Katy and their friendship. This book is sweet, loving and full of emotion.

It is springtime when Eliza’s Papa goes to sea aboard his merchant ship. As the seasons change, Eliza often asks her mother “Where is Papa, now?”, and each time Mama regales her daughter with tales of the exotic locales where Papa is traveling until he finally returns on Christmas Day. This book is illustrated with captivating and unusual cut-paper collages, and it is a good book for fathers who travel or to be read at Christmastime. Review by Book Dads

Anna and her best friend Katy love to play a secret game together where they pretend to be the characters in a television show. But when Katy's severely mentally handicapped brother has to be put in a facility, Katy takes out her frustration at Anna, whose life is much easier. Captures the intensity of friendships among tweens and their awkward and self-conscious transition from childhood to adulthood.

The close friendship of two eleven-year-old girls begins to unravel as each struggles to deal with a brother who is leaving home.

This seems like a book that is for much older teens because of its characters. Giselle is a ballerina, with a mother who is slightly crazy, and a father who died when she was a child. Giselle herself says that she has lived her life in a fog, and that is very true. Throughout most of the book she is very careful to surround herself with her panic and fears, and keep away from all but one or two friends. She remains numb. But she meets a boy named Will, who begins to draw her out of her shell and expose her to real life. This all takes place against a ballet background – both Giselle and her mother are ballerinas, and she takes a lot of ballet classes, which are interesting and add an unusual dimension to this book. However, it is Giselle’s relationship with her dead father that really defines her life, and the way the book comes about. I enjoyed this book about first love and families, but I would probably only recommend it to a few kids.½

Conway’s debut novel about a ballet student and daughter of two famous parents in the ballet world is a teen romance, coming of age story with the usual teenage angst. There is a first meeting, a first date, and a first kiss. In terms of today’s youth, it is indeed a work of fiction. Sadly, dating doesn’t happen that way anymore. The relationship between Giselle and her mother is strained due to Giselle’s rosy picture of her father, who evidently committed a sin by marrying a protégé much too young to be his wife—her mother. Keeping an apartment frozen in time for a decade to protect a six year old’s memory of her father as she grows all the way into adolescence is less believable. In the untangling, Giselle is able to see the skeletons in her father’s closet, just hidden in the recesses of her mind.½