I Am Not Jessica Chen
by Ann Liang
Genres: Romance, Contemporary, Fantasy
Magical Realism
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release Date: January 28, 2025
Pages: 320 (hardcover)
Rep: Asian cast
After getting rejected by every single Ivy League she applied to and falling short of all her Asian immigrant parents’ expectations, seventeen-year-old Jenna Chen makes a wish to become her smarter, infinitely more successful Harvard-bound cousin, Jessica Chen—only for her wish to come true. Literally.
Now trapped inside Jessica’s body, with access to Jessica’s most private journals and secrets, Jenna soon discovers that being the top student at the elite, highly competitive Havenwood Private Academy isn’t quite what she imagined. Worse, as everyone—including her own parents—start having trouble remembering who Jenna Chen is, or if she ever even existed, Jenna must decide if playing the role of the perfect daughter and student is worth losing her true self forever.
A one-liner review: This was WAY too shallow for what it could have been.
Ann Liang tends to work with familiar tropes, which can still make for an amazing book, which can still be great if it delivers on compelling characters and/or a focused plot… but I Am Not Jessica Chen failed at both of those things.
This book felt incredibly superficial. The narrative touched on some themes I was able to resonate with, but didn’t delve deeply enough to truly make me feel a genuine connection with the story or the characters.
The book promised to focus on everyone’s obsession over the smart kids, fancy schools, and privileged families, which, as someone living in Asia, I can tell you is a prevalent reality for some. The book kind of painted it in a really simplistic way, like everyone just automatically worships those people and their lifestyles. It missed out on showing the other sides of it – the jealousy, the ostracization, or even just people who don’t care either way. There are layers to people, society, and expectations. The story lacked any real layers or complexity.
Then there was this whole shift where, one minute, Jenna was obsessed with being Jessica, and then suddenly it was all about her crush on Aaron. It felt a bit out of nowhere. We’re constantly told that they have a history and that he’s really sweet, but he didn’t seem like a big enough deal to suddenly become Jenna’s main focus. It made the second half of the book feel disconnected and clunky.
The characters were extremely flat. Jenna’s whole life revolved around wanting to be Jessica so badly that she didn’t really have a personality of her own. Jessica and Aaron were too perfect and unrealistically flawless. Jenna didn’t even seem all that interested in actually understanding Jessica or what her life was like. It made it harder to really care about the main conflict and get a sense of how much both characters could have been dealing with.
And the ending? Even though Jenna went through all this stuff, it didn’t really feel like she grew or that anything was properly resolved. Nothing that happened in the book had any impact on how it ended, apparently.
Fable for the End of the World
by Ava Reid
Genres: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Romance
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: March 4, 2025
Pages: 384 (hardcover)
Rep: Queer MCs
By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.
Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.
Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.
When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.
For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.
As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.
And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.
This book throws everything at the wall – climate change, capitalism, sexism, you name it – but ultimately, nothing sticks. It’s a case of too many ideas, too little depth. I think the author had too much to say, but had trouble trying to balance all of that with the desire to keep the audience’s attention. The sheer volume of significant issues crammed into a relatively short book (less than 400 pages!) meant that none of them were given the space they needed to breathe and truly resonate.
The romance absolutely sucked. There was just no reason for these characters to have fallen for each other as hard as they did. They’ve known each other for two weeks, and have tried to kill each other multiple times. How could the romance have worked anyway if neither character was compelling as an individual? I remember close to nothing about both of them because their characters felt so inconsistent. Melinoë was supposed to be a trained killer but couldn’t handle a teenage boy who was only trained to hunt animals. Inesa’s characterization stopped being shaped by her background once she met Melinoë.
The only interesting character was Luka, Inesa’s brother. I hate the way in which his character disappeared to give the two MCs their alone time, and his character was seriously downplayed. He could have been such an interesting player in the story given his skills and relationship with Inesa, but his character was absolutely wasted.
There was no way this book was going to end in a way that would have satisfied me, given how things went down. At around 80% in, I was doubting that this was a standalone. Unfortunately, it is, and the ending sucked. It made sense given the overall vibe of the book, but it was deeply unsettling.
Overall, this book really needed more time to just… marinate. The author needed to completely understand the story she wanted to convey, to find a focus point that made sense. This book felt like a waste. It had so much potential.
*I wrote this review as I was reading Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, so it was crazy to see the difference of quality and nuance between this book and a book from the series this was inspired by.
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