Title: The Fine Art of Truth or Dare Author: Melissa Jensen
Published: February 16, 2012
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 380
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Ella is nearly invisible at the Willing School, and that's just fine by her. She's got her friends - the fabulous Frankie and their sweet cohort Sadie. She's got her art - and her idol, the unappreciated 19th-century painter Edward Willing. Still, it's hard being a nobody and having a crush on the biggest somebody in the school: Alex Bainbridge. Especially when he is your French tutor, and lessons have started becoming, well, certainly more interesting than French ever has been before. But can the invisible girl actually end up with a happily ever after with the golden boy, when no one even knows they're dating? And is Ella going to dare to be that girl?
I feel like, surprisingly, the jacket copy of The Fine Art of Truth or Dare was slightly misleading, what with its comparisons to Stephanie Perkins and whatnot. I was expecting a fluffy high school romance, but that wasn’t really what Melissa Jensen provided. It was set in high school, and there was a romance, but rather than fluffy, this book was, well…borderline boring.
I was cautiously optimistic in the beginning, since most reviews didn’t seem to be very favorable. And things didn’t start off too badly. Ella is an invisible girl at her ritzy school, flanked by her rich-but-overweight friend Sadie and oh-so-fabulous token gay best friend, Franke (who is referenced as, and I quote “Gaysian”). A little stereotypical, yes. Especially when Ella reveals that she has a crush on the ultimate it-boy, Alex, who is obviously unattainable. This is clearly a set-up for a fairly cliché novel, which, not going to lie, is sort of what The Fine Art of Truth or Dare is, but it had surprising moments of redemption at times (more on that later).
I think the biggest thing, though, is that this is long—nearly 400 pages in a genre that generally comes in at less than 300 pages. On top of the length, Jensen’s prose was not at all engaging for me. It wasn’t bad at all, but reading this book was a struggle. I wasn’t opposed to the characters or story, but the writing was inaccessible and difficult. There wasn’t a lot of life or fluidity in it, and so I ultimately found this book to be an extremely taxing, difficult read.
The prose being such a huge issue really affected my enjoyment of The Fine Art of Truth or Dare, which is a shame. There were actually some things I really appreciated about this book, namely the emphasis on Ella’s learning to have self-confidence. Even though the romance with Alex played a major role, I felt that Ella’s own character growth was just, if not more, important to the novel overall.
But overall, Ella and her friends were mostly nondescript characters for me. They were developed to a point, but the author definitely relied on stereotypes in building these people’s personalities. Ella’s most “unique” trait was her habit of talking to a postcard with a dead man’s statue on it. And he talked back.
The thing that Jensen excelled at, however, was the portrayal of Ella’s family. The Fine Art of Truth or Dare absolute nailed her big, noisy Italian family, with the restaurant and the nosiness and the super out-there grandmother. There was an atmosphere in the scenes where Ella was around her family that I really loved, and I think that had the family dynamics been more of a focus, I might have enjoyed this book considerably more.
As it is, The Fine Art of Truth or Dare is simply okay. Melissa Jensen’s storytelling has is moments, but ultimately I found this to be a surprisingly dull contemporary YA novel. I feel like it has a lot of great messages and themes, but the delivery is not good at all. So, altogether, I can’t exactly say that I liked this book, though I clearly did not hate it.
