The Best Possible Answer

The Best Possible Answer, by E. Katherine Kottaras
On Sale November 1, 2016 by St. Martin's Griffin
Rating: ★★★

So this is the book I expected: an over-stressed, over-worked, high school perfectionist with trust issues learns to open up to "Mr. Right" and live in the moment.

That's not the book I got. This book is not a typical YA romance. In fact, it's not really a romance at all.

This is a book about struggling to keep things together when your life is falling spectacularly apart.

Viviana has real issues. It goes deeper than the humiliation she feels from her first love spreading around her nude selfies in retaliation for their break up. This incident puts her in the hospital with a severe case of anxiety. Viviana's parents put enormous pressure on her to get into an elite college, and her father is livid that the nude pics might bar her from Stanford (how?). In fact, her father is so disappointed he's moved out of the home and gone off to Singapore. If that weren't enough pain, Viviana also struggles to repair her relationship with her mother. Then she learns the truth about her father, and it's something that would land even the most well-adjusted person into a lifetime of therapy. With all this going on, she learns her best friend, Sammie, is moving away, and they spend much of their last summer together fighting over a boy. Then there's a mentally ill professor living in their apartment complex who somehow is going to teach a bunch of teens some important life lessons (sigh).

I think this book tries to do too much. From the romance drama, to the family drama, to the best friend drama, to the sister drama... this book feels like a collage. A bunch of plot bits slapped together with glue into something that's not altogether horrible to look at but is undeniably cluttered. Each chapter starts with headers about studying for SATs, entrance essays to college, ect.-- I skipped past those.

Something needed to give with this book. Removing one or more of the story elements and going further into depth with the remaining could have made this a much better novel, IMO.