L'avete letta in italiano ad inizio mese in anteprima, oggi invece il libro esce ufficialmente negli USA ed è anche il giorno in cui pubblico la recensione in inglese in occasione del blogtour.
First of all, thanks to Meghan from Wednesday Books for sending me via NetGalley an eARC in exchange for a honest review.You have to know English isn’t my first language, so feel free to correct me if I make some mistakes while writing this review.
Title: The Mall
Author: Megan McCafferty
Publication Date: July 28th 2020
Pages: 320
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3ig6kAM
Plot: The year is 1991. Scrunchies, mixtapes and 90210 are, like, totally fresh. Cassie Worthy is psyched to spend the summer after graduation working at the Parkway Center Mall. In six weeks, she and her boyfriend head off to college in NYC to fulfill The Plan: higher education and happily ever after.
But you know what they say about the best laid plans...
Set entirely in a classic “monument to consumerism,” the novel follows Cassie as she finds friendship, love, and ultimately herself, in the most unexpected of places.
Cassandra Worthy is hit by a bad case of mononucleosis at the beginning of summer that even makes her skip the prom and the graduation ceremony - but it's just a small accident on the way in a plan that involves much bigger and more interesting things than two high school passage rites.
The day she is ready to go back to work at the mall, however, everything changes when her boyfriend of two years Troy gives her the cold shoulder and the she's almost suffocated to death by a cucumber-melon body spray that a sort of demon came out of hell - aka Helen, which apparently has replaced her in her own relationship and at work - sprayed on her as a petty joke.
With no more boyfriend and employment - no more Plan - Cassie feels lost and without direction; things even get worse when her parents also give her news that challenges everything she has always thought about the relationship between her parents.
It's not easy to start over - especially when the summer has already started and only a few places are still looking for staff. Even less easy is when you make a list of the mall's stores and the jobs you can do and as a rating scale to compare them you use the "attractiveness" of the male characters of 90210.
It doesn't help the guy from the music store who makes fun of you just when you're having the worst time and then you burst into tears right in front of your ex-best friend's mother - but hey, in the end it's Gia Bellarosa who offers to hire you, albeit under the bewildered and wary eyes of her daughter Drea, and Gia's boutique is so beyond that it cannot even be classified according to the lineup of 90210.
This is an opportunity to start again, perhaps to find a lost friendship, to learn to flirt and let go, to exchange pungent jokes with the boy from the music store and also to participate in a treasure hunt that begins in the basement of the mall.
Maybe not sticking to the Plan can also lead to great results.
So, we had a good start, then in the second part we went a little downhill.
I was very excited by the beginning: the 90s atmosphere, Cassie's cynical and caustic jokes, her melodramatic way of telling Helen's attack on her, the sudden but always worthy appearances of Zoe Gomez - who later turns out to be a sort of feminist "vigilante".
The reconstruction of the friendship with Drea is something hard and awkward at the beginning and although it was Drea who stopped being her friend seven years earlier, in the end it's Drea who decides to involve Cassie in the treasure hunt and that pushes her to be who she should always have been - and with statement Cassie will understand that two years with Troy, in an almost imperceptible way, have clipped her wings a little at a time.
However, Cassie never stops saying she's going to leave in a few weeks, that she's only keeping herself busy before she begins her real life in New York - getting on my nerves and on everyone's around her. At one point, Cassie believes she's the only one smart enough to go to college - especially since, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps not, she doesn't pay enough attention to Drea and her dreams and almost tramples on them mercilessly.
Cassie made me very angry in those moments, belittling the work of those who work inside a shopping center and those who - by choice or not - decide to not move to a big city.
I've always said that characters similar to me I either love them or hate them and this was the second case because it was precisely my similarities with Cassie that made me feel angry at her.
Because I too had dreams of glory, because I too would have liked to live in a city, because I too have a degree but I am still unemployed here at the moment, because I too - unfortunately - evaluate work based on how "cool" they could be, but I still worked the same in a shopping center last year and in the past years I had a job where I worked every day in summer without ever stopping because here we rely on tourism to get by.
But I never would have dreamed of stepping on other people's dreams believing myself more intelligent or capable because I know I'm not.
The story takes place in a month and a half, so don't expect great insights - it's a story with characters that remain quite shallow and Cassie herself and the boy from the music store don't share their name with each other except at the end despite several interactions, so much so that I asked myself more than once in the course of the reading if the name with which Cassie called him was not really the correct one and I had missed the presentations along the way.
Although the second part is not up to the first - and this is attributable to Cassie and her selfishness - it's still a book that gives great importance to women, their intelligence and their ability to rebuild a life starting from scratch without the need of Prince Charming to come and save them because they really can do it alone.
And it's true that it's also a slightly light and shallow book, but it's fluid thanks to its short chapters and is perfect for the summer - above all it's ideal if you are stuck in a slump like I was before reading it - because it's fun without wanting to be it at all costs and although I was born in 1989 (so I lived the 90s only in part), I found in this book all that distinguished them and all that was important for teenagers at the time.
Author: Megan McCafferty
Publication Date: July 28th 2020
Pages: 320
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3ig6kAM
Plot: The year is 1991. Scrunchies, mixtapes and 90210 are, like, totally fresh. Cassie Worthy is psyched to spend the summer after graduation working at the Parkway Center Mall. In six weeks, she and her boyfriend head off to college in NYC to fulfill The Plan: higher education and happily ever after.
But you know what they say about the best laid plans...
Set entirely in a classic “monument to consumerism,” the novel follows Cassie as she finds friendship, love, and ultimately herself, in the most unexpected of places.
--- ---
Cassandra Worthy is hit by a bad case of mononucleosis at the beginning of summer that even makes her skip the prom and the graduation ceremony - but it's just a small accident on the way in a plan that involves much bigger and more interesting things than two high school passage rites.
The day she is ready to go back to work at the mall, however, everything changes when her boyfriend of two years Troy gives her the cold shoulder and the she's almost suffocated to death by a cucumber-melon body spray that a sort of demon came out of hell - aka Helen, which apparently has replaced her in her own relationship and at work - sprayed on her as a petty joke.
With no more boyfriend and employment - no more Plan - Cassie feels lost and without direction; things even get worse when her parents also give her news that challenges everything she has always thought about the relationship between her parents.
It's not easy to start over - especially when the summer has already started and only a few places are still looking for staff. Even less easy is when you make a list of the mall's stores and the jobs you can do and as a rating scale to compare them you use the "attractiveness" of the male characters of 90210.
It doesn't help the guy from the music store who makes fun of you just when you're having the worst time and then you burst into tears right in front of your ex-best friend's mother - but hey, in the end it's Gia Bellarosa who offers to hire you, albeit under the bewildered and wary eyes of her daughter Drea, and Gia's boutique is so beyond that it cannot even be classified according to the lineup of 90210.
This is an opportunity to start again, perhaps to find a lost friendship, to learn to flirt and let go, to exchange pungent jokes with the boy from the music store and also to participate in a treasure hunt that begins in the basement of the mall.
Maybe not sticking to the Plan can also lead to great results.
So, we had a good start, then in the second part we went a little downhill.
I was very excited by the beginning: the 90s atmosphere, Cassie's cynical and caustic jokes, her melodramatic way of telling Helen's attack on her, the sudden but always worthy appearances of Zoe Gomez - who later turns out to be a sort of feminist "vigilante".
The reconstruction of the friendship with Drea is something hard and awkward at the beginning and although it was Drea who stopped being her friend seven years earlier, in the end it's Drea who decides to involve Cassie in the treasure hunt and that pushes her to be who she should always have been - and with statement Cassie will understand that two years with Troy, in an almost imperceptible way, have clipped her wings a little at a time.
However, Cassie never stops saying she's going to leave in a few weeks, that she's only keeping herself busy before she begins her real life in New York - getting on my nerves and on everyone's around her. At one point, Cassie believes she's the only one smart enough to go to college - especially since, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps not, she doesn't pay enough attention to Drea and her dreams and almost tramples on them mercilessly.
Cassie made me very angry in those moments, belittling the work of those who work inside a shopping center and those who - by choice or not - decide to not move to a big city.
I've always said that characters similar to me I either love them or hate them and this was the second case because it was precisely my similarities with Cassie that made me feel angry at her.
Because I too had dreams of glory, because I too would have liked to live in a city, because I too have a degree but I am still unemployed here at the moment, because I too - unfortunately - evaluate work based on how "cool" they could be, but I still worked the same in a shopping center last year and in the past years I had a job where I worked every day in summer without ever stopping because here we rely on tourism to get by.
But I never would have dreamed of stepping on other people's dreams believing myself more intelligent or capable because I know I'm not.
The story takes place in a month and a half, so don't expect great insights - it's a story with characters that remain quite shallow and Cassie herself and the boy from the music store don't share their name with each other except at the end despite several interactions, so much so that I asked myself more than once in the course of the reading if the name with which Cassie called him was not really the correct one and I had missed the presentations along the way.
Although the second part is not up to the first - and this is attributable to Cassie and her selfishness - it's still a book that gives great importance to women, their intelligence and their ability to rebuild a life starting from scratch without the need of Prince Charming to come and save them because they really can do it alone.
And it's true that it's also a slightly light and shallow book, but it's fluid thanks to its short chapters and is perfect for the summer - above all it's ideal if you are stuck in a slump like I was before reading it - because it's fun without wanting to be it at all costs and although I was born in 1989 (so I lived the 90s only in part), I found in this book all that distinguished them and all that was important for teenagers at the time.
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