VIOLA IN REEL LIFE
by Adriana Trigiani
Popular adult author Trigiani’s (Very Valentine, 2009, etc.) first young adult novel is a quick read. Fourteen-year-old Brooklyn native Viola Chesterton is not happy attending Prefect Academy (PA), an all-girls boarding school in South Bend, Ind., while her filmmaking parents are in Afghanistan for a year making a documentary. At first reluctant to embrace campus life, Viola eventually bonds with her three roommates and becomes the most popular girl on campus after—OMG—securing a hot boyfriend. She also single-handedly saves the Founders Day play with her superior knowledge of filmmaking and wins second place for her amateur film. Throughout the year, the budding filmmaker records her experiences at PA in her private video diary, The Viola Reels; her first-person narration is, like, punctuated by IM transcripts. Though the characters are flat and stereotypical, the dialogue unoriginal, the first-person narration at times self-consciously shallow and the plot predictable, teens looking for something light with a touch of romance may find something here. Here’s hoping, though, that successors in the series treat its audience with a bit more respect. (Fiction. YA)