This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

Source: Publisher
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.
Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, THIS SONG WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE is an exuberant novel about identity, friendship, and the power of music to bring people together.
I related to Elise a lot.  Especially as a teen, I felt like an outsider and I didn't really have a place in a world. I have also been bullied. Elise's character was really good at portraying these issues in an impacting and intelligent way. I also enjoyed when it showed her DJing, because she found herself and was able to have fun. I liked all of the allusions to music and found it to be a good addition to the story. I think that it is also very true, because books and music both have aided me when I was in a very dark period of my life and allowed me to realize that there is still hope and love. I found the plot to be very engaging and I became sucked into this book quickly. This book is a lot different than the book that I have previously read from her, Mostly Good Girls. The writing is more intense and grabs you in certain places. Overall, I enjoyed this book and hope to find more like this book in the future. I also definitely need to check out Past Perfect!

Waiting on Wednesday (99)

Title: Past Perfect
Author: Leila Sales
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Date: October 4th, 2011

A summer job is exactly the distraction that Chelsea needs in order to finally get over Ezra, the boy who dumped her on her a** 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?

I loved Leila Sales' first book Mostly Good Girls, when I read it last year. It was clever and really funny. I can't wait to read her next book Past Perfect, which sounds so amazing.

Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales

Rating:

Characters: 19/20

Plot: 18/20

Originality: 18/20

Writing: 19/20

Recommendation: 19/20

Overall: 93/100 or A

Source: Publisher

It’s Violet’s junior year at the Westfield School. She thought she’d be focusing on getting straight As, editing the lit mag, and making Scott Walsh fall in love with her. Instead, she’s just trying to hold it together in the face of cutthroat academics, Scott Walsh’s new girlfriend, and the sense that things are going irreversibly wrong with her best friend, Katie. When Katie starts making choices that Violet can’t even begin to fathom, Violet has no idea how to set things right between them. Westfield girls are trained for success—but how can Violet keep her junior year from being one huge epic fail?

I love funny realistic books and that is exactly what I found in Mostly Good Girls. I knew that I was going to love this book, when I opened it and found Violet's list of goals for this year. Violet was sweet, smart, determined, and funny. I loved that she was so realistic. She reminded me so much of one of my best friends growing up. Her best friend Katie was very awesome too. I loved that they were very loyal to each other and cared about what happened to them. They also had their fights, but no matter what they were friends in the end. I love private school books, because I didn't go to one. All girl schools just don't seem like a good idea, because all of the drama that happens. In this book that is what made it so awesome. All of the antics that Violet and Katie had were so hilarious. This book was really original, compared to most books I have read this year. It focused more on friendship, then on boys. Sales' writing was humorous and I loved that. I also didn't expect everything that happened and that there was some suspense in the ending. Mostly Good Girls reminds me of the Georgia Nicolson series, which I love. I really think that you should go read this book now, it is amazing!

Humor Writing...

I have the awesome part one of Humor Writing from Leila Sales. I hope you enjoy.
Above all else, Mostly Good Girls is a funny book. I gave copies of an early draft to three different friends and asked them to mark every place where they laughed aloud. Whenever there was a page that none of them had marked, I would go in and fix it to make it funnier. That is how important it was to me to have a laugh line on every page.
Humor writing takes instinct, for sure, and I would never claim that I always get it right. That said, I did three years of improv and sketch comedy with a troupe called Off-Off Campus, and I used to write a humor column for my college newspaper and over the years I’ve learned a lot of rules for being funny. On my blog tour, I’m going to share with you a few of my best humor writing tools and tricks. Starting with:
1. “YES, AND.”
Agreement is your number one tool for getting a scene off the ground and making it be funny. If one character says, “Let’s go explore the abandoned library!” and the other character says, “No,” then, um, that’s it. Your scene just ended. But if one character says, “Let’s go explore the abandoned library!” and the other replies, “Yes, and let’s bring our ghost-finding apparatus!” then your story just got the opportunity to go somewhere.
More to the point, this is a rule about all the characters agreeing to exist fully in this world. There’s a scene in Mostly Good Girls called “The Candy and Tampon Locker,” and it talks about the communal all-class locker that’s filled with candy. And tampons. This concept would be a lot less funny if Violet and Katie kept being like, “This is really weird. Why do we have a Candy and Tampon Locker in our school?” (Even though, of course, it is really weird.) It’s funny because they all just go with it, like, “Obviously we have a Candy and Tampon Locker; otherwise, where would we go every time we need Sour Patch Kids? And tampons?”
Unfortunately, since I wasn’t man enough to own up to being the tampon thief, we all got the benefit of Mischa’s lecture. “What if somebody got her period, and there were no tampons in this locker?” Mischa asked us, rhetorically. “Would you just let her bleed all over the floor?”
Rachel’s face paled, and she looked like she was going to puke. I felt the exact same way. I’m all for the female empowerment fostered at all-girls’ schools, but sometimes I really wish Westfield were co-ed because I think if we had guys here we wouldn’t talk so often about menstrual blood.
Mischa’s so picky, anyway. It’s not like the Candy and Tampon Locker was completely empty. There was totally a half-full bag of Rollos in there.
Last thing on agreement: I have found that it’s almost always funnier to be excited about something than it is to be disparaging. Some of my best humor pieces have been about how I love Degrassi, or cider donuts, or Jock Jams. No one is interested in hearing that you hate doing homework. We all hate doing homework. But if you were super-excited about doing homework, well, that’s an opportunity to be funny.