“disappearing is an art form,

and i am it’s queen”

Help!!

Tell me what I️ should read next! I’m moving along pretty quickly with The Night Circus and hopefully should be done by the time thanksgiving gets here, so what should I️ read next? The other books on my list for the month are Ari and Dante, Turtles All the Way Down, and Eliza and Her Monsters

Books I Read in 2022

#5 – Eliza and Her Monsters, by Francesca Zappia

• Forgotten YA Gems BOTM
• Rating: 2/5 stars

I like a few of the things this story was trying to say, and a few small things it managed to accomplish, but I don’t care for the great bulk of it.

First, the entire premise. I get that YA can depict teens in unrealistically aspirational situations, but as an adult reader I had trouble swallowing the idea that a teenage artist still in school was capable of producing such a beloved and beyond-wildly popular webcomic. It just felt fake to me the entire time, and since it’s the entire core of the story, that’s a problem.

Second, what is Eliza’s deal? I mean that in good faith, because over the course of the story she shows various markers for a variety of mental illnesses or inherent neurodivergence, but the only aspect of her mental health that is actually addressed at any point is her post-revelation anxiety. Her obsession/hyperfixation on her art and the community it created could be read as a sign of autism, or ADHD, or depression-related escapism. Her absolute lack of interest in relating to other people on a face-to-face level could be any of those things or straight up social anxiety. At some points she clearly dissociates from her body, and that’s never explored. And her final dip into briefly-possibly-suicidal territory happens in a flash for plot reasons and is never important again.

Nothing about her mental landscape is ever definitive, and by the end, treating her anxiety and calling that a day seemed shallow and slapdash. The inability (or unwillingness) of her family to recognize that she’s not “normal” and take steps to either heal that (if it’s treatable illness) or accommodate that (if it’s neurodivergence) is a source of conflict that was genuinely painful to read, and not resolved to my satisfaction.

Third, Eliza’s constant insistence that she’s not a “writer,” she’s an artist. Okay, I get that you’re not producing vast quantities of prose like Wallace’s fan fiction or his novelization of your comic, but even if you’re primarily using art, you’re still “writing” a “story,” Eliza. If you were just an artist, there would be no narrative, you’d just do endless portraits and landscapes of your fictional characters and world, and there would be no movement to it. Every time it came up, it felt so disingenuous.

Fourth, the romance, which was the thing I disliked the least. Even if I don’t think it’s great overall, it has the lion’s share of individual good moments of the story. I liked that Wallace and Eliza became friends and eventually a couple by slowly accepting each other’s weirdness. That’s wonderful and I’m here for it whenever that’s the basis for a relationship. I also love, truly and actually love, that when the split happens over Eliza’s withheld identity, Wallace is allowed to be angry and stay that way for a good long while. So many romances rely on near-instantaneous forgiveness from the wronged party, and it often comes off as unbelievable that those characters get over their anger or betrayal so fast and with so little consequence. But here, Wallace is given the space to be rightfully (or perhaps even righteously) angry, he’s allowed to express his hurt, and while our protagonist is clearly unhappy about that, she’s not trying to pretend it’s unjustified.

I’m less in love with how he does actually forgive her, because it’s related to the book’s ultimately shallow treatment of suicide. I think that really cheapens the ending of their arc, and also is another nail in the coffin of how this story poorly represents mental illness.

Finally, in the “things I didn’t like” category, I don’t feel that the story snippets included from the comic, or the comic pages themselves, added anything of noticeable value to the novel. I get what they’re trying to do, but since I don’t actually read this fictional web comic and I only have the vaguest idea of who these ancillary characters are from what the story characters say about them, I could never bring myself to care, nor could I easily see what were probably supposed to be parallels with the story characters. The book wanted me to be as deeply invested in this web comic as Eliza or her fans, but I can’t be, because it doesn’t actually exist for me to be invested in. I wanted to be invested in the story I was actually getting, and every time it dragged my attention away from that to the comic or the prose transcription of the comic, I didn’t want that, I wanted more story.

AUTORA: Francesca Zappia

EDITORA: Greenwillow

ESTRELAS: 5/5

Infelizmente esse livro não foi lançado no Brasil, mas eu amei tanto que achei que valia a pena fazer uma resenha mesmo assim. Ele conta a história de Eliza, uma adolescente que escreve um dos mais famosos quadrinhos online, mas que prefere se manter no anonimato, ela também sofre de ansiedade e não tem muitos amigos. Até que um dia chega Wallace na sua escola, o escritor mais famoso de fanfics das HQs. Os dois acabam se aproximando e Eliza fica no impasse se deve ou não contar ao garoto que ela é a famosa escritora.

O que eu mais gostei no livro foi a representatividade da ansiedade de forma verossímil, já que é uma doença comum nos dias atuais e precisa ser falada. Apesar do livro parecer grosso, a escrita é tão fluída que você nem percebe que está lendo, o que faz com que a história voe. Intercalado com a história existem alguns textos e quadrinhos tirados da obra de Eliza, achei desnecessário, mas não é nada que atrapalhe. A Eliza também me incomodou um pouco no início, pois a achei irritante, mas o sentimento foi passando com o decorrer da história.

Somente em um momento pensei em tirar uma estrela do livro, pois a cena foi muito errada e a autora em nenhum momento havia mostrado que se opunha a isso, mas depois de um tempo ela “se desculpou”. A cena ainda me incomoda, assim como a cena da “desculpa” não me agradou muito, porém não queria tirar a estrela por isso, então deixei passar.

Recomendo demais esse livro para quem consegue ler em inglês, e se você gostou da premissa peçam para as editoras publicarem ele aqui! Obrigada por lerem :)