Francesca Zappia’s Eliza and Her Monsters is another book to come in the wake of Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl. It to explores the life of the chronically ignored and underappreciated girl who lives her life more on- than offline. I have to be honest, I don’t like the trope, and it almost makes me miss dystopia. That said, I did enjoy Eliza and Her Monsters, honestly more than Fangirl or any of the others I’ve read that have come out of this most recent YA craze.
Eliza Mirk has no friends. No real life friends, that is. They’re all online, and they’re all reading her amazingly famous webcomic (seriously… the way the popularity of this thing is described makes it feel like the next Calvin and Hobbes, rather than a moderately successful Check Please). No one outside of her family knows she’s LadyConstellation, something she’s completely happy to keep true as she wanders through her senior year.
And then comes Wallace Warland, who is not a casual reader of Monstrous Sea, Eliza’s webcomic. He’s its biggest fanfiction writer, and once he finds out Eliza is a fan as well, he enlists her to start editing his stories. This does at least break away from the all too popular trope of the female fanfiction writer with no friends cliche, but Wallace still has friends (all of whom love Monstrous Sea, naturally) while Eliza does not.
Insert high school romance here.
Eliza and Her Monsters is cute. I’ll give it that. It also has a pretty good portrayal of what it is like to live with anxiety, which is seemingly at the root of a lot of Eliza’s problems. It’s worth a read, especially if you’re someone who loves contemporary young adult literature and its current fanfiction boom. It’s not a book that made me feel much either way, but I am perfectly happy to admit that my taste is not anywhere close to the be all and end all of books, and is honestly probably not very good.
If you disagree and you loved Eliza and Her Monsters, let me know why. I’m not opposed to giving it a second chance!