Review: This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

Title: This Song Will Save Your Life
Author: Leila Sales
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Release date: September 17th 2013
Pages: 288
Genre: Young Adult contemporary
Source: BEA - I received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!
Add to Goodreads | Purchase from Amazon

Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski’s strong suit. All throughout her life, she’s been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up. Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing.

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I loved this book so much. Leila Sales's style perfectly balances laugh-out-loud moments with more meaningful, insightful ones. Yes, this is a book about a suicidal girl, but it's also incredibly entertaining; I laughed out loud more times than I can count. Just as many times, though, the writing made me pause and think about the very serious issues presented here. Leila Sales's writing flows so nicely, and it works really well with Elise as our main character. There is something about Elise that I loved so much. She is sarcastic and fun but also honest and refreshing. I loved every second of this novel.

The bullying storyline is one I was not looking forward to. Books about bullying usually make me hate basically everyone involved, which in turn makes me feel like a horrible, insensitive person, meaning I end up hating myself too. And stories relating to popularity are usually cliched and plain annoying. But in This Song Will Save Your Life, it totally works. Characters in stories like this one often feel one-dimensional and cliched to me, but there are no villains in This Song Will Save Your Life. Emily, Amelia, Sally, and Chava are all relatable and seem like real people.

Even more than the school storyline, I loved the whole clubbing and DJing scene. Elise's passion for music really shines through, and every scene at the club had this certain energy to it, conveying the glamour of it all and making the reader feel alive and vibrant. The characters at the club scenes are great: Vicky and Pippa are so much fun to read about. I really liked reading abut Elise's relationship with Char, too: it doesn't follow the typical YA romance storyline pattern, and it might not work for some readers, but I for one loved this refreshingly different approach.

I don't even know what it is about this book that made me love it so much. There is something about Leila Sales's writing that just works. Equally entertaining and insightful, This Song Will Save Your Life is a story of love: romantic love, love between family and friends, and most of all, learning to love yourself. I loved it, and I can't wait to read more of Leila Sales's books.

Review: Past Perfect by Leila Sales

Title: Past Perfect
Author: Leila Sales
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release date: October 4th 2011
Pages: 306
Genre: Contemporary YA
Source: Won from Carmen Rodrigues - thanks!

Add to Goodreads | Purchase from Amazon

A summer job is exactly the distraction that Chelsea needs in order to finally get over Ezra, the boy who dumped her and broke her heart to pieces just a few weeks before. So when Chelsea's best friend, Fiona, signs them up for roles at Essex Historical Colonial Village, Chelsea doesn't protest too hard, even though it means spending the summer surrounded by drama geeks and history nerds. Chelsea will do anything to forget Ezra.
But when Chelsea and Fiona show up for their new jobs, they find out Ezra's working there too. Maybe Chelsea should have known better than to think a historical reenactment village could help her escape her past. ...or will this turn out to be exactly the summer that Chelsea needed, after all?

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I'd heard that Past Perfect was an adorable and hilarious read from so many people, but I still wasn't sure whether I'd like it - humor is hard to get right in books, it's a hit-or-miss kind of thing for me. Luckily, though, the humor in this novel was just the way I like it, and so was everything else in Past Perfect - I loved it!

Chelsea was the best part of Past Perfect, for me. Yes, she can be melodramatic and kind of self-obsessed, but I felt for her; she's real, in an endearing way. Chelsea's humor is effortlessly entertaining, snarky, sarcastic, and funny in a very clever way. I just loved her so much!

I loved most of the secondary characters, too. Fiona is an awesome best friend to Chelsea, and I loved her personality; she's superficial in a funny, self-deprecating and endearing way. Also awesome are Chelsea's parents - these are the kinds of parents I want to see more often in YA! Chelsea's dad is simply the most kickass dad in history (get it? I know, I'm so funny).

The only characters I didn't love as much were the love interests, Ezra and Dan; their personalities are underdeveloped, in comparison to the rest of the cast. But I honestly didn't mind that much - the description makes it seem like Past Perfect focuses a lot on romance, but to me, it wasn't really about these boys; it's about Chelsea and her character growth, family and friendship, and I really liked how much it focused on these themes, even if it means our love interests are kind of one-dimensional. And even if I didn't love the love interests as characters, I really like how Leila Sales developed these relationships; they felt innocent and sweet, but still very realistic.

Asides from the characters, the unique setting is what makes Past Perfect so special - all the history stuff is awesome! I'm not exactly into history, but the way it's presented in the novel, with Chelsea's hilarious commentary, I loved it. And the war stuff is awesome too - weird and kind of ridiculous, but in a totally awesome way.

Past Perfect is such a cute book; both entertaining and insightful, with kickass characters and an effortlessly hilarious writing style. I'm looking forward to reading more from Leila Sales soon!

Interview with Leila Sales (Past Perfect Blog Tour)

Today we have Leila Sales, author of Mostly Good Girls and Past Perfect, here for an interview! This post is part of The Teen Book Scene's blog tour for Past Perfect. You can find out more about the tour here. Make sure to visit all the other stops of the blog tour if you'd like to know more about Past Perfect!

Have you aways loved writing? What made you decide to write for teens?

Yes, I have always loved writing! And I have loved writing for teens ever since I was a teenager myself. I started reading and writing YA lit when I was in middle school, and I just never stopped.

Can you tell us a bit about the writing process? Do you have any weird writing habits? How has writing this novel been different from wiritng your debut, Mostly Good Girls?

I wrote MOSTLY GOOD GIRLS on and off over the course of two years. I didn’t have an agent or a book contract at the time, so there wasn’t any rush. PAST PERFECT, on the other hand, I wrote in about six months. It was already under contract with Simon Pulse, so there was a deadline in place before I even knew what my second book would be about. I wrote the last 20,000 words in 21 days—and that was while I was working a 9-to-5 job, too. It was not the easiest 21 days in my life, but I look back on it now and I feel like, “Wow, I did that!”

Also, PAST PERFECT is a more linear story than MOSTLY GOOD GIRLS. With a few exceptions, I wrote the scenes in PAST PERFECT in the order that they now appear in the finished book. On the other, writing MOSTLY GOOD GIRLS required a lot of arranging and rearranging the chapters. So in many ways the experience of writing PAST PERFECT was different from the experience of writing MOSTLY GOOD GIRLS.

As for weird writing habits… I eat a lot of chocolate chips as I write. I mean A LOT. I usually eat chocolate chips and write until I feel too sick to my stomach to go on, and that’s how I know I’m done writing for the night. I do not necessarily recommend this as an artistic technique.

If you coud pair your main character, Chelsea, up with any character from any book, who would it be and why?

That’s a tough question! There are so many good options. I think I’d go with Naomi, the protagonist in Gabrielle Zevin’s MEMOIRS OF A TEENAGE AMNESIAC, because both Naomi and Chelsea grapple with some similar questions of memory and self-reinvention. Plus, I’m just crazy about that book!

Chelsea has a summer job at Essex Historical Colonial Village, a historical reenactment village - why did you decide to make Chelsea work at a place like that? Did you have to do a lot of research in order to be able to write that storyline?

The summer I was 19, I had a part-time summer job as a costumed tour guide on Boston’s Freedom Trail. I wrote a number of short essays about it at the time—about how hot it was in those thick layers of clothes, how seriously everyone took it when the British redcoat reenactors showed up on the Fourth of July, how hard it was to flirt with boys using only Colonial vocabulary. I felt like there was a longer story in there, but it took a number of year for me to figure out what that story was. I drew on those essays and my journal from that summer as I wrote PAST PERFECT.

As I was writing this book, I also took a research road trip down to Colonial Williamsburg along with my writing partner, Rebecca Serle. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation was very helpful, and they set up a meeting between me and one of their teen interpreters. The poor girl, though—I kept asking her questions like, “So, do you ever date any of the guys here?” or, “Where would you say the ‘cool kids’ work? Like, in the stables? The church? Or what?”

Thanks for the great interview answers, Leila!

Make sure to check out all the other stops of the blog tour, and keep your eye out for Past Perfect, which has already been released.

Past Perfect by Leila Sales

(Amazon / Goodreads)

 

 

A summer job is exactly the distraction that Chelsea needs in order to finally get over Ezra, the boy who dumped her and broke her heart to pieces just a few weeks before. So when Chelsea's best friend, Fiona, signs them up for roles at Essex Historical Colonial Village, Chelsea doesn't protest too hard, even though it means spending the summer surrounded by drama geeks and history nerds. Chelsea will do anything to forget Ezra.
But when Chelsea and Fiona show up for their new jobs, they find out Ezra's working there too. Maybe Chelsea should have known better than to think a historical reenactment village could help her escape her past. ...or will this turn out to be exactly the summer that Chelsea needed, after all?