Review: Isla and the Happily Ever After

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's really the only way I can express how I feel about this book, with maybe a couple <3s thrown in for good measure. I want to live in this series.

For three years now, Isla Martin has been seriously crushing on Josh Wasserstein, one of her classmates at SOAP. He's been dating another girl, though, and she's painfully quiet, so she hasn't been able to do anything about it.

Until now.

Isla strikes up a conversation with Josh while high on painkillers (legally, she got her wisdom teeth out) in NYC, which leads them into a tentative friendship once they get back to school. Isla even gets assigned to Josh's old dorm room, a coincidence her romantic soul really enjoys.

Josh seems to be acting a little tentative around her, though, and she finally discovers why: he thinks she's dating her best friend, Kurt, since they spend so much time with each other. She quickly sets him right, and they begin a whirlwind relationship, exploring Paris and Barcelona with each other on some seriously impressive dates.

So of course it all goes downhill when Josh gets expelled for finally breaking too many rules at SOAP. Sneaking out to other countries is totally against school rules, and combined with his three previous years of exploiting his Jewish heritage and skipping out on his homework, the school can't give him any more chances. He's sent back to NYC to go on the campaign trail with his politician father, while Isla's left in Paris.

Isla's afraid Josh only likes an image of her he's created in his head and that they only started dating because they were both single at the same time, and her doubts aren't helped any by the new distance between them and the autobiographical comic book he gives her, where his ex is plastered all over the book but Isla's only in eight pages at the end. Over Christmas break she picks a fight with Josh and breaks up with him, thinking it'll be better for them both in the long run.

Except it's not. Now Isla's still miserable but even more alone, thanks to how she's been treating Kurt and Hattie. Since Isla devoted so much of her time to Josh, Kurt found new friends who share some of his other interests, and an ex-friend of hers tells her that she's been treating Hattie more like a child than a sibling ever since they got back to school. Isla slowly makes amends, though, repairing both of her relationships and realizing that her inner self isn't always right about other people.

At the end of the novel, Isla gets a phone call from Josh, saying he and some friends of his (aka Anna, St. Clair, Lola, Cricket, and Meredith) are all in Paris for a bit before going off to the Winter Olympics, and that they'd all love to see her. Will the promised happily ever after finally occur?

(Yes. Duh. Sorry, that was a terrible question.)

Anyways, I loooooooved Isla. I think it's actually my favorite of the three. Isla's personality really matches up with my own, so seeing her learn and grow was fascinating (and potentially helpful) to me. I also adored the Anna/St. Clair moment at the end - not gonna spoil it, but I definitely had to hold in a squeal of glee.

Another thing I appreciated about this book: Kurt. I knew before it was explicitly stated that he was autistic, and I thought it was so fantastic that he was included. He's not tokenized in any way, nor does Isla see herself as some kind of saint for being best friends with The Autistic Kid. He's just Kurt, the boy she's known since childhood, and they're pretty much each other's only friends for a large portion of the book. There are even references to Kurt having a type when it comes to girls, subtly refuting the "people on the autism spectrum are too different to feel romantic attraction" idea that goes around. I'm not trying to say Kurt's the best example of diversity to ever be written ever, but he was definitely written well.

Finally, I'm so happy that the basic scheme of this novel was different from both Anna and Lola. Both of those novels kind of followed the same pattern where the girl and the boy meet, but circumstances prevent them from getting together until the end of the story. While Anna and Lola's stories diverged enough that I didn't feel like I was reading the same idea with the names changed, I was still glad to see that Josh and Isla got together pretty early in the story, and then had to deal with the troubles that come when you'd like to sustain a relationship. It was a nice change of pace.

Overall, Isla and the Happily Ever After is superb. The characters are wonderful, the plotline's a bit different than Perkins' other books, and the appearances by her previous protagonists wrap up their stories in the best possble way. I know this is the last book she plans to write in this series, but that doesn't stop me from wanting more. Five stars.