Belles

Title: Belles

Author: Jen Calonita

Publisher: Little, Brown

Release Date: April 10, 2012
Received From: Publisher in return for a honest review

Summary:

Fifteen-year-old Isabelle Scott loves her life by the boardwalk on the supposed wrong side of the tracks in North Carolina. But when tragedy strikes, a social worker sends her to live with a long-lost uncle and his preppy privileged family. Isabelle is taken away from everything she's ever known, and, unfortunately, inserting her into the glamorous lifestyle of Emerald Cove doesn't go so well. Her cousin Mirabelle Monroe isn't thrilled to share her life with an outsider, and, in addition to dealing with all the rumors and backstabbing that lurk beneath their classmates' Southern charm, a secret is unfolding that will change both girls' lives forever.

Review:

I have read and loved Jen Calonita’s Secrets of My Hollywood Life series and so I was super excited to read Belles especially after reading the summary.

Contemporary fiction is not really my thing, I mean I like it enough but give me a historical or a fantasy over contemp. any day. But then I read books like this and The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight and I remember how much I actually like contemporary fiction.

I really enjoyed Belles. It was so much more than I originally expected. I loved seeing the plot unfold from both Izzy and Mira’s points of view, it made the story much more 3 dimensional. Though I have to say that I liked the ones from Izzy’s POV more, but that may just be because she had more story to tell.

Savannah is terrible. Are you kidding me? When you think of that mean girl in movies or whatever this is the quintessential girl, and unlike how sometimes in those movies/books the girls learns her lesson and becomes nice, this does not happen to Savannah. Which I really appreciated because that doesn't happen to often in real life so it was nice to see that.

I felt like Izzy and Mira were both perfectly written, they were conflicted and thought they were doing the right things when in reality it was the opposite of what needed to be done. I felt like that was pretty true to life, especially Izzy’s hesitance for buying new clothes and stuff.

The one thing I didn’t like was the fact that the twist didn’t surprise me too much, but it was okay because the book was so good besides that. I cannot wait for the next installment!