You Should See Me in a Crown - Leah Johnson - ★★.¾

AUTHOR: Leah Johnson

GENRE: Young Adult Fiction.

PUBLICATION DATE: June 2, 2020

RATING: 2.75 stars.

This was the August YA pick for Reese Witherspoon's YA Book Club. So I decided to give it a try as I was anyway in a mood to experiment with an unknown book. Unfortunately though, this was a really disappointing read. I'm still trying to figure out if the book itself is bad or whether my expectations soured my experience.

Liz Lighty, a financially-struggling 17-year-old black girl who stays with her grandparents and younger brother, loses out on the scholarship to her dream college. To earn money, she decides to participate in the highly competitive school prom to win the title of Prom Queen and the financial prize that comes with it. Along the way, she accepts her sexual orientation more openly and falls in love with a fellow prom queen competitor. The book is about her journey to accepting herself without being worried of what others will say.

What could have been a brilliant narration of self-awareness turns out to be a book full of commonplace clichés. Try thinking of any done-to-death idea, it's there in this book. Dead mother, absconding father, loving grandparents, mean cheerleader classmate, sickness that worsens at the most inappropriate point in the narrative, triumph of true love, villainous teachers turning out to be secret heroes, underdog winning the competition, friendships that break and get patched up at the opportune moment,.... Yeesh! There was absolutely nothing in the book that strode away from the tried-and-tested path. 

Basically, it is a school love story with only the LGBT factor making it stand apart from a typical chicklit. If it were a children's book, I would have been very forgiving of the typical storyline because children like comparatively straightforward plotlines and happy endings. But as a YA book, it could have experimented so much more with the flow. However, it ends up as an unsatisfying attempt. 

On second thought, this is Leah Johnson's debut work, so maybe I should cut her some slack. I'll rate it 0.25 more than what I originally intended.