Practically Ever After deserves praise for its main character's diverse and unstereotypical array of interests, from engineering to fashion to dance and cheerleading, but that same complexity does not apply to the rest of the cast. After the initial overwhelming feeling of meeting so many characters in the first few pages, everyone but Grace quickly settles into a single consistent role, reminiscent of nothing more than a workmanlike My Little Pony fanfiction. Each character fully embodies a single character trait and plays that one role in every scene they're in.

This is most egregious with Grace's love interest, Leia, who feels the least characterized of anyone in the book. This is a fairly natural result of Grace's own choices... Grace spends the first part of the book ignoring Leia at every opportunity, and it's made clear she has no interaction with Leia's friends or hobbies, which results in the reader not knowing much about her either. She exists to give Grace a negative repercussion for her obsessive focus on planning out her life, and then reward her again once she makes some effort to apologize at the end of the book. Grace's love for Leia feels endlessly shallow, culminating in her final list of reasons the two of them should get together again, every one of which amounts to "Leia makes me happy" and none of which give any consideration to Leia's feelings or to what Grace could or should contribute to their relationship. Even their initial conflict is totally forgotten with no plans for how to avoid having it happen again. All of this is, admittedly, in character for the self-assured and self-absorbed Grace, but the book fails to question it.

As for the rest of the book, it feels simultaneously too pat and too low-stakes. Grace is forever having chance encounters that relate suspiciously well to her greater conflicts, from coincidentally meeting a girl with an injured leg while wondering if she wants to focus her life on fixing people's bodies, to watching her parents fight in a way that gives her eerily useful insight into her own relationship problem. The characters cannot shut up about how fleeting high school friendships and romances are, even to the point where one character starts reading a fantasy story about the subject. And despite the book seeming to try for a narrative of Grace taking on more than she can chew, it's just not there... other than her (ultimately salvaged) relationship with Leia, and a brief mention toward the beginning of not being pre-accepted into a college cheerleading team, Grace succeeds at every new commitment she agrees to take on. Various moments foreshadow things going wrong--her dance students grumbling that she doesn't seem to have a plan, her lack of focus on asking glove patients for their own opinions, the ongoing mystery of when she actually sleeps--but none of them come to anything. Grace is supremely capable and it is unclear what she is supposed to learn from that.

(This review is based on an Advanced Reading Copy.) ( )