Book Review: Fans of the Impossible Life, Kate Scelsa

Title: Fans of the Impossible Life
Author: Kate Scelsa
Published:10/09/15, MacMillan Children's Books
Pages: 336
Source: Netgalley & MacMillan Children's Books
Format: Ebook
Rating: 2/5

This is the story of a girl, her gay best friend, and the boy in love with both of them.

Ten months after her recurring depression landed her in hospital, Mira is starting over as a new student at Saint Francis Prep. She promised her parents she would at least try to act like a normal, functioning human this time around, not a girl who sometimes can't get out of her bed for days on end, who only feels awake when she's with Sebby.

Jeremy is the painfully shy art nerd at Saint Francis who's been in self-imposed isolation after an incident that ruined his last year of school. When he sees Sebby for the first time across the school lawn it's as if he's been expecting this blond, lanky boy with a mischievous glint in his eye.

Sebby, Mira's gay best friend, is a boy who seems to cary sunlight around with him like a backlit halo. Even as life in his foster home starts to take its toll, Sebby and Mira together craft a world of magic rituals and secret road trips, designed to fix the broken parts of their lives.

As Jeremy finds himself drawn into Sebby and Mira's world, he begins to understand the secrets that they hide in order to protect themselves, to keep each other safe from those who don't understand their quest to live for the impossible.

A captivating and profound debut novel, "Fans of the Impossible Life" is a story about complicated love and the friendships that change you forever.

Fans of the Impossible Life follows three teenagers through a year of growing friendship (and growing up) highlighting the different problems each of them face. it's sort of similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower in a way. However, I didn't enjoy this one as much.

Fans of the Impossible Life, like many YA novels, is set in and around Saint Francis Prep, the school in which Mira and Jeremy attend. Perfectly logical considering they are teenagers. What I wasn't so sure about was why Sebby would want to hang out in a school he doesn't go to even if he is best friends with Mira. I don't know if that happens in bigger places, but my town has one school so I just can't contemplate this ever happening. I would also say that Mira, Sebby and Jeremy are all fairly likeable characters, but I just couldn't click with any of them no matter how hard I tried. I don't really feel that they are particularly memorable either.

The story is told via the alternating perspectives of Mira (third person), Jeremy (first person) and Sebby (second person). I wouldn't have minded the switch between characters, but the way the story would switch from first to second to third person just confused and irritated me. This is another reason why I didn't enjoy Fans of the Impossible Life as much as I'd have liked. I would just get used to one and it would switch. I felt it made the writing quite choppy.

I also felt that the story was quite slow and dragged in places. This also led me struggling to remember what had happened previously in the story. I wouldn't say the story was predictable, but it didn't really have any twists to it either. And the ending was a bit too open for me. Lots of questions were left unanswered and I never like that.

Overall, Fans of the Impossible Life was an okay read but nothing mindblowing. I am glad I gave it a chance but I don't think it is a book I would recommend.

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