Anatomy of a Misfit - Andrea Portes

Anatomy of a Misfit by Andrea Portes
Published by Harper Children's on September 2, 2014
Pages: 336
Genres: Contemporary, Realistic Fiction, Coming of Age
Format: eARC
Source: Edelweiss

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This emotional, hilarious, devastating, and ultimately triumphant YA debut, based on actual events, recounts one girl’s rejection of her high school’s hierarchy—and her discovery of her true self in the face of tragedy.
Fall’s buzzed-about, in-house favorite.
Outside, Anika Dragomir is all lip gloss and blond hair—the third most popular girl in school. Inside, she’s a freak: a mix of dark thoughts, diabolical plots, and, if local chatter is to be believed, vampire DNA (after all, her father is Romanian). But she keeps it under wraps to maintain her social position. One step out of line and Becky Vilhauer, first most popular girl in school, will make her life hell. So when former loner Logan McDonough shows up one September hotter, smarter, and more mysterious than ever, Anika knows she can’t get involved. It would be insane to throw away her social safety for a nerd. So what if that nerd is now a black-leather-jacket-wearing dreamboat, and his loner status is clearly the result of his troubled home life? Who cares if the right girl could help him with all that, maybe even save him from it? Who needs him when Jared Kline, the bad boy every girl dreams of, is asking her on dates? Who?
Anatomy of a Misfit is Mean Girls meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Anika’s hilariously deadpan delivery will appeal to readers for its honesty and depth. The so-sad-it’s-funny high school setting will pull readers in, but when the story’s dark foreboding gradually takes over, the devastating penultimate tragedy hits like a punch to the gut. Readers will ride the highs and lows alongside funny, flawed Anika — from laughter to tears, and everything in between.

Honestly the only good thing that I can say about this book is that is really short so even if you don't like it, it will end fast. But that’s it, the rest is just downhill. And maybe the humour will click with some people, with me it never clicked and was just annoying and childish the way Anika thinked everything in a ironical way 24/7, I love irony ok? But it was just bad on this case, trust me. 

Let’s start with our main character, Anika, she starts as one of the most popular girls on the school and is a terrible person in general – she slut shames her sisters, even her supposedly best friend (and also calls her dumb or similar in various occasions, usually together with some remark on how her friends looks), she also drugs her boss (I don’t care if he’s a terrible person, no one can just ‘slip’ some sedative on someone else drink, also the medicine she put in there is a addictive drug which means that after some time the person will not be able to sleep without medicine and will probably suffer insomnia for the rest of her life). Delightful person is Anika right?

Then we have the “romance”, I put romance between quotes because this isn’t really romance, we basically have two cases of extremely instalove. Logan is an outcast, but a really hot outcast that for some reason unknown starts to like Anika, so he starts giving her rides home on his super cool motor bike – but no one can known or Anika’s popularity will be ruined. Despite the fact that, supposedly, Logan gives Anika rides every day after school we only have like four scenes with them before “I love you” come into picture – which made me really not like their relationship. On the other hand we have Jared a super popular dude that every girl wishes to date, for some reason also unknown, wants Anika. Now I may have let Logan intalove slide if their scenes were cute because of the whole “forbidden love” but Jared and Anika scenes made me roll my eyes with intensity, it was so ridiculous the supposed intensity Jared adored her after like 5 seconds talking to her.

But, I mean this is a contemporary book, so of course Anika will grow past all this right? She will get past the appearances and found love and accept her weird family right? She will come of age and found her true self right? Right but only because of a “twist” that really bothered me. The first thing was that the “twist” wasn’t really a twist since I called it on the first time Anika visited Logan’s family, seriously hints need to be more subtle. Second, and what really bothered me, was that Logan’s history was a very painful one and could have been an amazing book all by itself but for some reason it was used only as a background on this one and the only point for being here was to make Anika have a big cheese moment and plot device which, for me, shouldn’t have been the point. Overall this is just the story of a spoiled girl who realizes that live isn’t all about herself.

Recommended to: no one really.