Faking Perfect

Tyler Flynn is fantastic. Forgive me for starting this “review” with Tyler Flynn, but bear with me for a moment here. This guy, Tyler Flynn, was seduced by Lexi Shaw for one and only one reason—to warm her bed. And I had absolutely no qualms about that, considering the sex was consensual and they were being safe. But here’s the deal: Tyler wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lexi and vice versa. They were supposed to keep their relationship confined to the bedroom and even though Tyler knew of Lexi’s life-long infatuation with her friend Ben, he wasn’t supposed to mention that ever. You may think that Tyler is just another filler character (which was my assumption too) but you slowly discover something completely different. We don’t see Tyler as much as we want to, but he’s a major character alright. He was a constant source of confusion for Lexi, considering he had started to break her rules, and she was thinking of him a lot more. And in the scenes were he really was present, I loved everything about him. He may have been a bad boy but he was definitely the bad boy you want to see in YA.

Lexi Shaw is no typical YA heroine.There is a certain way that Lexi had about her, that made you want to sympathise as well as throttle the girl all the time. She was real and she was flawed, and that entailed to her making a lot of mistakes. But Lexi was the character who, to me, was the perfect personification of a girl whose actions would make me reconsider mine. High school is not easy, no matter where in the world you might be, and its been almost 4 years since I’ve graduated mine. But reading Lexi, her actions and the reasons behind them, and reading how everyone is helpless against certain circumstances, made me want to go back and correct many of my own actions. I was no bully, far from it, but I was passive high school. And Lexi, the way she was with her friends, made me regret turning a blind eye to a lot of things that I’d seen back then.

Parent-Child Relationships are often complicated. And we need to understand that. Lexi’s relationship with her mother was something I hadn’t expected. Sure, it was mentioned in the blurb that her mother was an alcoholic who “chased losers to pay the bill” but I wasn’t quite sure what that would mean for Lexi. But what I read in the book was equal parts horrifying and eye-opening. This isn’t the worst parent-child relationship I’ve read in a book, not even close, but it was kind of like watching a car wreck. You want to turn away and avoid the pain of the scene, but your eyes remain glued to the wreckage. Something like that. Every time Lexi and her mother had a conversation, it was pretty horrible to read, and I did consider skipping those pages, but in the end, I couldn’t turn away. The whole thing served as an eye-opener, like these things happen in families and there’s nothing you can do kind of a revelation.

Your friends are your biggest asset. And Faking Perfect proves that.Lexi’s friends were all over the place. Some were shallow and the others were judgemental and some were plain mental. But then she had other friends, true friends and I could only imagine how much Lexi needed her friends. Lexi’s father makes contact with her after almost 13 years, and she has to choose whether or not she wants to have him back in her life. And this is precisely where her friends came in. Without them, Lexi wouldn’t have been able to take the right decisions for her, and her friends stood by her through whatever choice that she would make. One of her friends in particular was accused of having ulterior motives by Lexi’s boyfriend and Lexi believed him, and that pissed me off. But what mattered most to me was what I learnt from this book? Friends are important. They support you and tease you and challenge you and take you higher than you ever could be, simply by being your friends.

Because I said so.


I WAS PROVIDED A FREE EARC OF THIS BOOK IN EXCHANGE OF AN HONEST REVIEW. THIS DID NOT IN ANY WAY, HOWEVER, INFLUENCE THE CONTENT OF THIS REVIEW.