When I began reading this book, I had extremely high expectations. The Bodies We Wear by Jeyn Roberts had everything I typically want and can never find in a book – a teenage girl who kicks butt (in, like, literally every way possible), a mysterious love interest, and just enough similarity to the real world for me to be able to pretend that I’m the protagonist. Unfortunately, The Bodies We Wear disappointed right from the start, and I wasn’t even able to force myself to finish it.

The set-up of the book has every YA element you could want – and it is that which brings about its downfall. Ms. Roberts promises so much that she is unable to completely develop any one aspect of the story. For instance, Ms. Roberts places the protagonist Faye in an urban setting, where she lives in a rundown part of a city battered by the drug “Heam”. That is all well and good, and was actually very promising. But then she gives Faye a scholarship to a wealthy private school, and the whole setting of the book has changed. The sudden switch from girl struggling to survive to moody emo teenager is jarring and drags the book down. I understand that YA novels are generally expected to have some element of fantasy to them, but I expect the characters to be realistic in terms of the story. When you have a character like Faye, who is so completely out of line with the others featured in the story, the story begins to feel like a badly written fanfiction and not an actually published novel.

Another main problem with the book is the writing itself. Never before have I witnessed a book use so few commas. The majority of the sentences are short, with no connection to the next. The effect, then, is a stilted one – it’s difficult to just read a couple of paragraphs whenever you have a minute because it takes a while for the story to begin to flow together. Short, to the point sentences have their place, and when used right can keep the book easy enough to read that it appeals to readers of all ages. In this case, however, the sentences only serve to make the narrative choppy and annoying to process.

This review is not to say that The Bodies We Wear is an unequivocally terrible read. Lord knows I can be a snob sometimes when it comes to reading, and what bothers me about the novel might be your cup of tea. I’m just warning you – if you’re at all anything like me, this book is probably not the best one for you.

 

(And in an act of shameless self-promotion, I’m going to encourage you to check out some of my other posts here on Blueprint if you want some suggestions for reading.)

 

-Raelyn