Siera MaleyCritiques

Outstanding!

200 plus pages of heart wrenching crying. A good thing in my opinion. Sweet tears. Untainted by bitterness or angst. Outstanding for a shortish young adult novel. Reminds me of the video for ‘Savin’ Me’ by Nickelback. However, the song playing through my head was ‘How to Save a Life’ by The Fray.

So different from my typical reading at the moment. So worth my time and yours.

Pretty good book. Not a favorite but a solid friendship turns to love story.

I thought the pacing was mostly good, but a number of parts could have been fleshed out more. I also thought they should have spent more time on the friendship itself early on, so we get a better sense of what 'normal' is for their friendship before things change. It would have been nice had they fleshed out more of the side characters as well. Given how important the club is, it would have been nice to get to know the club members better. As you can see, my broad complaint is that it just isnt super fleshed out.

Now to what i liked. I really enjoyed the dialogue and the flow the story had. It was a page turner for sure, which is why i finished the book in one sitting. I liked the main characters and their chemistry. Its probably the biggest thing the story has going for it, Katie and Sarah have a pretty awesome dynamic. The scenes with Katies family were great and the way the coming out happened was in good taste. The confession scene was fantastically done, and the ending really hit the sweet spot for me.

Its a fun read for sure, and while not as good or in depth as other lesfic romance, it is a solid story. Worth reading for sure

Sweet sporks, this sounds intense.

This was a fun and light read which I really enjoyed! I found the writing style to be simple and straight forward. It's a book you'll pick up if you're looking to just dip your toes into something uncomplicated to relax for the day for sure. I don't agree with some of Sarah's decision but it wasn't all bad because she redeemed herself throughout the book? There's not much I can say about this but I liked it and you should try reading it yourself too! Came here from Colorblind and I think I prefer this but that is just my personal preference, of course.

Received ARC.
Review on Metapsychology Online

I usually skip YA books, but with over a thousand reviews, I gave Maley's book a go. To my surprise, Dating Sarah Cooper was a terrific read. This romantic tale touches on just about every common issue from friends to lovers, coming out, homophobia, friendship, safe sex, etc. You name it, it's there. Katie and Sarah's friendship felt real, which made their journey as a fake couple a bit angsty but entertaining. Their journey would not have been as interesting without the supporting characters. Through them, I sympathized more with Sarah than I did with Katie. Katie had an innocence about her that made her more genuinely approachable. Plus, she had people she could confide in, which was not the case for Sarah.

This book satisfied my addiction, it's a quick read, and I recommend it.

A fluffy fun romcom, this one. Friends-turned-lovers, coming-of-age and fake relationships: this book straddles many tropes with élan. Though it truly stretches suspension-of-disbelief with the basic reason for the two MCs to fake being a couple, it is just so cutely done that you flow with the whole thing.

Read the full review @https://www.bestlesficreviews.com/2019/01/dating-sarah-cooper-by-siera-maley.html

I didn't read this book for years, though I'd seen it around, because I was wary of the Coming Out and After School Special qualities of the book. I haven't been in the mood to read that kind of thing for years now - but then last weekend I realized that this is a fake dating story, one of my favorite plot themes, and if I complain so much about not seeing much of it, I should read it when I do see it.

To my great delight, Dating Sarah Cooper absolutely revels in its clichés and hits every single customary plot point of a fake dating story, at least according to the romance novels and fanfic I've consumed over the years. I hope that it's not a spoiler to say that we get the classics: a nonsensical reason to pretend to date; the embarrassment and/or confusion about Real Feelings; poor communication which leads to acting out by kissing someone else (or further) just to pretend not to be emotionally invested in the fake relationship; a fight when it gets Too Real and the fake dating almost falls apart; at least one person getting suspicious and not believing the fake dating story; and my favorite - when fighting and pretending not to have real feelings, the MCs still drop everything to take care of each other and eventually admit the fake dating isn't fake anymore. ("Probably hasn't been fake for a long time" is the sort of phrase you usually see around that point in the story.)

Beyond the completely predictable and not surprising plot, I can't say the book itself is particularly good or noteworthy.

The technical skill of the writing is honestly kind of terrible. I'm not sure if Maley ever spoke any of the lines out loud, but the book is full of sentences that are completely unlike how people actually talk, and she constantly uses "Sarah and I" where just about any other pronoun would be more natural. I really wanted to drag the ebook into Calibre and do a global change command on the possessive version, if nothing else.

There is a lot of infodumping about queer resources and homophobia that gave the book an extreme After School Special feel, but could have been woven in more delicately by a more experienced writer or thoughtful editor. I was less than thrilled by the call-outs to specific lesbian pop culture, but I never like that kind of thing because of how it dates books, and an ongoing thread about the tragedy of girl/girl romances in pop culture was more nicely done and appreciated.

And yet, I was irritated by clunky writing and awkward pop culture, and still found myself completely invested in the story and staying up far, far past my bedtime to read the entire thing, instead of the single chapter I had planned. I don't think it was just the plot theme, as much as I adore it and will read just about anything using it. I think Maley captured something in the characters that made me really care about them, even if I didn't give a fig about anyone else.

If I weren't in the mood to indulge in a completely predictable fake dating story, would I have liked this book so much? Probably not. But I admire writers who go all out when writing something so well worn (please note my adoration of Audrey Coulthurst's Of Fire and Stars and L.A. Meyer's Bloody Jack series), and Dating Sarah Cooper was exactly what I wanted to read this weekend.½

Colorblind is a wonderful young adult novel (although I never did figure out why it was given that title). I entered the drawing because it seemed to have a Tru Calling vibe to it---a girl can see when someone is to die, and [in this particular case] she is determined to try to stop it from happening.

It is about young love, the fear of loss, and overcoming those fears. The author has done an especially excellent job expressing how young love felt. It is an easy-read, and one that once you start will not want to put it down until you have finished reading it.½

Summary: After her celebrity mother dies, Lauren is sent from L.A. to a rural farm in Georgia to help her work on her emotional issues. When she's not avoiding her negligent alcoholic father, Lauren's used to skipping school, using lots of drugs and alcohol, and having random hook-ups with girls she never talks to again. Taken in by miracle-worker David Marshall and his family, Lauren starts to reflect on her own behavior — but also quickly sees through the veneer of the perfect family at the Marshall house. And, of course, she falls in love.

Thoughts: Taking Flight is an OK read, but nothing special. The book could have done with some editing — the endless "Cammie and I" hypercorrection is irritating, and the use of characterization and description is minimal.

When Lauren meets Cammie for the first time, she describes her as "hot." Later, again, on the phone to her friend Caitlyn, "hot." What does that even mean? What does she look like? What makes her hot? A few chapters later, we find out that she's blond. OK. Then, "the prettiest girl on the [cheerleading] squad." Very helpful. I'm not a fan of purple prose, but some description would be useful. Even the horse, Aerosmith, is left entirely to the imagination, besides being apparently very scary and "gross."

I probably wouldn't have noticed the lack of physical description had everyone been fleshed out into three-dimensional characters. But unfortunately, they don't have notable or unique personalities, so it's hard to get too emotionally invested. The romance at the heart of the novel is sweet, but not terribly compelling, since the characters feel so flat.

Other information is spotty too; by the end of her stay, Lauren's developed some muscle from all her farm work — what farm work? There's little mention of it as the story unfolds. There was the one time Cammie showed her how to clean a stable. And she milked a cow for about five seconds...?

And call me femmephobic, but I found it really hard to believe that Lauren "started wearing heels at five" and owns only one pair of normal shoes. Even the rich child of a celebrity has surely worn sneakers before??

I did like this quote though: "I'm the froggiest frog to ever freaking frog; I was a frog for, like, more girls than I even know."

While I found it to be a bit predictable, I rarely hold that against a story. Most of them are, frankly. What I found really good about this book, were the emotional moments and the way the reader could infer Sarah's emotional progression through the eyes of the protagonist, Katie, even though Katie wasn't able to make the conceptual leaps necessary to see how Sarah really felt about her due to her own confusion and preconceived notions about who her best friend was.

The other thing that stood out was Katie's parents. Their reaction to the fact that their daughter had realized she was gay, even though it was actually premature, was spot on with many stories I have read and heard personally from LGBTQ teens and young adults. I personally know several people whose parents had already guessed that their child fell somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum prior to their coming out. It was very well written, despite the fact that the parents botched the handling of it. Actually, that awkward scene about "a dog, a cat, or both" was one of the most humorous, yet gut wrenching, scenes in the book and stood out as one of the most "true" moments in the story to me. (I am a parent, after all... One has to pay close attention to how young people write parent characters to gain insight into how our generation of parents is perceived in the world. LOL)

In addition, it was through the brief conversations about Sarah with Katie's mom that I really gained insight into just how bad Katie's blind-spot was when it came to how other people view Sarah. Sure... she knew, in an intellectual sense, that people thought Sarah was, to put it politely, frivolous. (The real words people would have used for her are too impolite to put here... If she were a boy, player would be appropriate, I suppose.) But Katie never saw her that way. She saw a girl looking for something real and failing to find it, not just a girl looking for something "now". It very much implied that Katie's mother was right and she was viewing Sarah "through the eyes of love" and not as she actually lived her life.

It was clear early on that Katie was probably a lesbian who just hadn't figured it out yet early on. The description of her indifferent relationship with her ex and the occasional comments about girls left hints. The real kicker was when she finally told Austin why she broke up with him: she never loved him and had dated him because of peer pressure, essentially. It was clear that she had never felt a real spark with a guy, yet with Sarah she got all weak in the knees from just a kiss and she even felt a little something when playing spin the bottle and kissing Jessa. But it was really clear before then...

The real question was what was going on in Sarah's mind and heart. She certainly acted like a jealous girlfriend many times, with a bit too much sincerity to be feigned unless she was a far better actor than we were led to believe. (It was hard to believe she was that good of an actress since Katie had already commented on the fact that Sarah was actually a pretty bad debater and didn't realize it herself. That indicated to me that she wouldn't be able to pull off that level of gut-instinct jealousy without it being real.) Eventually, I only really wondered WHEN Sarah realized that she was actually in love with her best friend/fake girlfriend. At one point, I had a hypothesis that Sarah wasn't actually lying when she said that she had realized her feelings for Katie a few years ago and that, instead of this being a ruse to try to attract the interest of Sam, she instead was actually trying to live out her fantasy of Katie being in love with her without risking rejection, because she couldn't believe that Katie would EVER actually fall in love with her. In that scenario, her "boy crazy" behavior was all just Sarah trying to avoid her true feelings. That turned out to be wrong, at least in that Sarah wasn't cognizant of her feelings until after their first kiss. Instead it was Katie who realized that she probably had been in love with Sarah, without ever realizing it, for years. Looking at her old pictures of the two of them and her parent's certainty that she had been in love with Sarah for years all boiled over into a realization that she just never understood her own feelings. That was the closest to a surprise that the story offered me, and it was a pleasant one.

The one missing star in my rating probably is because of the rampant alcohol use and Sarah's fling with Sam, which was gut-wrenching and probably necessary to the story, but almost too painful in many ways. (I would have preferred if she had stopped short of actually having sex with him, but that wasn't in Sarah's character. She had such a low opinion of herself that she had to punish herself, I'd say.) Not to mention her statement that "it was worth it", about her affair with Sam. I would have rather had her NOT actually say that and instead come to the realization that she came to at the end sooner.

The biggest plus that I see in this story, however, was it's critique of the media depiction of lesbian relationships in Sarah's search for a story with a happy ending and the comments about lesbian characters dying. This is a particularly topical criticism with recent events and I thought it was rather insightful and positive about the need to have positive story representation for all people. Bravo!

Good story, some flaws

I really enjoyed the story, even the heartbreaking parts. In fact, I found it hard to put down. However, there were several times where it seemed like the story changed from first person to third person and it was kind of jarring. It is one of the author's earlier books, maybe her first, and I KNOW her technical skills are catching up to her creative skills, because I have read several of her books over the past week or two. I saw the ending coming, but that doesn't mean it didn't leave me with a smile.

Broken people healing each other

This heartwarming story is about a bad girl who is sentenced to therapy after she stops going to school, or much else, after the death of her movie star mom and the "perfect" good girl with more issues than the bad one and how falling in love with each other heals both of their tattered souls. It is fantastic, frankly, and I had trouble putting it down. Siera Maley has a gift for crafting characters who are deeply flawed in realistic ways and putting them into stories where they shine like gemstones on a sunny beach. Lorren and Cammie are marvelous characters and their story is touching, sweet, and heartwarming.

I was thinking, somewhere near the end, that this seemed like more of a 4 something star book than a 5. By the time the book ended, I couldn’t remember why and thought it more of a 5 star book. If I had recalled and rejected whatever my initial thought was, I could happily mark this a five. As it is, I’ll just put it as 4.5 for now.

With that out of the way I can turn to how I’m not sure how to say anything about this book without being all spoiler-y. I mean, it’s true that the book opens with this prologue chapter that is set, chronologically, about eight months after the start of the book. Not counting the epilogue, the book ends roughly at that point as well. Including the epilogue it ends 2 weeks later.

So – this book involves Sarah Cooper and Katie Hammontree, high school seniors in a small town in Georgia. They are the kind of people you might spot who seem to always be connected at the hip. Have been since at least kindergarten. Hanging all over someone as best friends doesn’t exactly make someone, or two people into a couple – as in a relationship coupling. Though it can be misinterpreted by outsiders (and, for that matter, those inside). That ‘misinterpreted by outsiders’ comes to the forefront relatively early in the book.

Katie, while walking home from school, runs into this big jock guy who is bullying a fellow male student. Katie puts a stop to it. Jake, the kid who had been in the process of being bully-ed, has a severely bruised lip. During the process of dragging Jake back to her place so she can get her friend, who plans to go to medical school, to patch him up (‘She likes playing doctor’), Katie learns that Jake had been bullied because he is gay. Also that he is a fellow senior who she hadn’t recognized.

So, back to Katie’s, Sarah enters the scene and is all huggy, and all over Katie, Jake comes out of the bathroom and sees this and puts 2 and 2 together and invites them to a club he belongs to at school. Sarah’s all excited about joining another club, since it will look good to colleges, so accepts immediately. Jake leaves. Shortly thereafter they realize that they didn’t learn what the club was.

Fast forward to about 30 seconds before the start of this unnamed club – Katie, Sarah and Jake are standing outside a door. I don’t recall what the exact words were, but basically Jake says something like ‘let me go in first, I’ll let them know a lesbian couple will be joining our gay club’ and then enters the room. So, not only is it a gay club, it’s a club that will think they are lesbians. They stare at each other. Then Sarah gets this calculating look in her eyes (okay, I might be making up that part, she did come up with a plan though). Sarah pulls Katie in and they meet the club. Sarah informs them that she’s actually bi, and Katie’s a lesbian. She doesn’t inform them, though, that she’s pretending and is using this to get ‘attention’ from a guy she’s had a crush on since freshman year.

And so, the book unfolds from there. Two best friends forever being mistaken as a lesbian couple, one realizes this is her chance to add ‘attention’ to herself and drags the other into ‘it’. And they spend the next 8 months ‘pretending’ to be a ‘gay couple’.

Now I’m back to not knowing what to say. I figured that whatever it was that was holding me back from giving a five star rating would pop up and I could tackle it. But it didn’t appear . . . so . . .. I liked Katie and Sarah. There situation was unfortunate in once sense and fortunate in another that I won’t mention here. The plot was solid. There was enough of an end-story to fill me in. Though I wouldn’t mind, say, a sequel. Maybe they could end up at college together? And yes, that did pop up in my mind – the fact that one, Katie, planned on going to a local college, and the other would be going to some further away place. They didn’t seem like a high school fling type of thing, but that is left hanging. What’s next?½

Good story...great interaction between the characters. Definitely makes me NOT want to go back to High School.