When I was reading this novel, I was very entertained by it. I found it a complex exploration of adolescence punctuated with wit, humour and characters I could empathize with and relate to. I found the writing style to be engaging and smart and I really liked the different mediums interspersed in the novel that gave it a wider scope than the simple narrative technique would have. Stuff like emails, lists, excerpts from scholarly articles. The conversations with the painting/sketch of Edward Willing were pretty genius and I was enormously amused by them.The friendships were well portrayed and Frankie remained a favourite character and still remains one though the magic has significantly faded from the novel. All characters are well hewn - except for the mean girls who remain a mystery (though their mean-girl-ness was justified in this case) and I will say it out right now - I wish the story had been about Ella and Daniel rather than Ella and Alex because - well, I have some problems where that is concerned.I may have talked about this earlier. When the love interest is dating the Mean Girl who is excessively mean to the protagonist, it makes me doubt the legitimacy of the love interest. If he is so droolworthy and nice and all things awesome, why in the world is he in a relationship with someone as horrible as the Mean Girl? What does it say about him that he is intimate with a person who, from the descriptions of her and through her treatment of Ella, is just terrible person?Is she a Mean Girl so the protagonist does not look like a horrible cow for stealing away a nice girl's boyfriend? Which is another issue I have with the book. He has a girlfriend and yet he is treating you like you are special which is awesome and all for you but there is another girl out there. One who has a right to know that whatever you are doing at his house, it is not the studying you are supposed to be. And hell girl, why would you want to be with a guy who treats girls the way he is treating his current girlfriend - and you are not her. It disturbs me, okay? It is cheating. And Ella's insistence on holding on to a guy who has a girlfriend makes me think not so friendly thoughts towards her. This normalizes cheating, in fact, it promotes it simply because the girlfriend is a Mean Girl. I'm sorry but no, I don't buy that. He should have had the balls to break things off with her before coming after Ella.Another thing that did not sit well with me is how Ella goes off on a tangent about what "an assertive girl would do" making that assertive girl look/seem ridiculous and very improbable. A strong girl = an undesirable girl with a side of ridiculousness which may have been charming the first time around but raised my hackles all the other times. No, being an assertive girl, Ella, means having the foresight to see that a guy who acts like this with one girl will most probably act like this with another girl. That if the Mean Girl is the one being ditched right now, it will you being ditched the next time. An assertive girl will realize that acceptance from a boy means less than acceptance from yourself. An assertive girl will realize that her friends mean more to her and will mean more to her in the future than some guy who looks through her in the hallways at school. That's what an assertive girl would do. How an assertive girl would act.Oh I know that not every character can be superwoman. I don't expect every character to be actualized and strong. I just don't want assertiveness, a strong self-esteem to be disparaged as I felt they were in this novel. I totally disliked the ending of this novel. Ella does not grow as a character. Superficially it may seem that she does but really, it's only a Cinderella story.That rant over, I did enjoy the book as I was reading it which is why I give it three stars. If you do not give books the same analysis I do, I dare say you will have less problems with the novel than I did. Read it for Frankie, yo.
