Review: Sia by Josh Grayson

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

So, spoiled rich girl lives a life of selfishness and bullying, putting other people down in order to raise herself up. Girl goes through the trial of a lifetime and realizes the error of her ways, serving penance for the way she has treated those around her. This is not a new story, but it could have at least been interesting. It could have been a story worth telling. Sia could have been a character I grew to care about.

Unfortunately this book is full of near-misses for me. I can get on board with the bully-learns-her-lesson trope, if the bully actually does learn her lesson. Sia does not. Sia didn't need to learn anything; she woke up one day an entirely different person. The only thing that showed her the error of her ways was looking at her previous life through the eyes of a stranger-- eyes that already knew right from wrong.

I could have dealt with this, even, if the book had given New!Sia any glimpses of why she became the horrible person that she apparently had been before, if New!Sia could have said, "Oh, I understand why I acted that way, but really I think I should be a better person anyway." That would have been acceptable character growth. But that didn't happen! Not only was the explanation of Sia's memory loss anticlimactic (it was basically a "Yeah, that happens sometimes" situation), but we did not even get an explanation for what made Old!Sia the supposed worst person, like, ever. There was nothing to connect me to either New!Sia's I-spent-a-couple-weeks-homeless-and-now-I'm-a-champion-for-the-masses attitude or Old!Sia's money-makes-people-superior attitude.

And I've already forgotten the love interest's name, so you can see how much of an impression he left on me. Not only this, but the rest of the characters all around are cliched to the point where I caught myself actually rolling my eyes. The only black character is a wizened homeless woman, the only Latina is Sia's rich family's housekeeper, and every rich person in the book is-- you guessed it-- white. Oh, except for the beautiful Asian supermodel, of course.

Combine all of this with the fact that there is no sustained tension in the story-- every source of potential conflict plays out within a chapter or two-- and a romance that is probably supposed to be cute but hovers dangerously close to annoying teenaged insta-love, and you'll be glad this book is a short one. Had it been about 50 more useless pages, I would have closed this off in the DNF section of my brain halfway through.

Usually when I write a scathing review of a book, I like to leave off with something positive (like, "I hated the characters and the plot, but the writing was beautiful"), but the only positive thing I can say about Sia is that I was able to finish it. The writing was unimpressive and frankly too juvenile for the Young Adult genre, so I can't even use that to soften the blow. But I did finish. It was a breeze of a book, simply because there was so little substance to it.

The takeaway: Don't bother.

★☆☆☆☆