Review: My Life Undecided by Jessica Brody

From Inside Jacket: Please read this! My life depends on it! Okay, maybe that was a bit melodramatic, but I’m sorry, I’m feeling a bit melodramatic at the moment. Here’s the deal. My name is Brooklyn Pierce, I’m fifteen years old, and I am decisionally challenged. Seriously, I can’t remember the last good decision I made. I can remember plenty of crappy ones though. Including that party I threw when my parents were out of town that accidentally burned down a model home. Yeah, not my finest moment, for sure. But see, that’s why I started a blog. To enlist readers to make my decisions for me. That’s right. I gave up. Threw in the towel. I let someone else be the one to decide which book I read for English. Or whether or not I accepted an invitation to join the debate team from that cute-in-a-dorky-sort-of-way guy who gave me the Heimlich Maneuver in the cafeteria. (Note to self: Chew the melon before swallowing it.) I even let them decide who I dated! Well, it turns out there are some things in life you simply can’t choose or have chosen for you - like who you fall in love with. And now everything’s more screwed up than ever. But don’t take my word for it, read the book and decide for yourself. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll scream in frustration. Or maybe that’s just me. After all, it’s my life.

My Rating: 2.5 hearts 

Thoughts on the Novel: Recently, I've been trying to read some of the older books on my shelf. After liking Jessica Brody's The Karma Club, I figured I'd give another novel of hers a try. I therefore chose My Life Undecided because I remembered that it had something to do with a blogger. 

While reading My Life Undecided though, I found out that it really doesn't give an adequate depiction of how much work goes into running a blog. If I didn't know anything about blogging, I would assume from My Life Undecided that you can quickly set up a blog, write some posts without preparation, and get followers and comments almost instantaneously. There's certainly no need to connect with fellow bloggers via social media or by leaving comments!

In terms of characterization, I thought the secondary characters were pretty clichéd. For example, you have the frenemy, the hot guy everyone wants to date, the sweet nerd, the perfect older sister, etc. As for Brooklyn, I didn’t particularly hate or love her. Also, aside from her one bad decision at the beginning of the book, I felt that that the unrealistic situations she found herself in were more of a case of bad luck than stupidity. There was no reason for Brooklyn to overreact and have other people start making choices for her through a blog. 

My Life Undecided was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2011. 

Comments About the Cover: I like its simplicity, and think the model’s pose matches the book’s title nicely.