DNF Review: Pushing Perfect by Michelle Falkoff

Pushing Perfect

by Michelle Falkoff

Source: eARC provided for review.

My rating: 2.5 stars

GoodReads/ Amazon/ TBD

Summary:

A girl’s quest for perfection results in dangerous consequences in this layered, suspenseful YA novel by the author of Playlist for the Dead.

How far would you go to be perfect?

Kara has the perfect life. She gets perfect grades. She never messes up. Until now. Because perfection is an illusion, and Kara has been struggling to maintain it for as long as she can remember. With so much pressure to succeed, it’s hard not to do whatever it takes. 

But when Kara takes a new underground drug to help her ace the SATs, she doesn’t expect to get a text from a blocked sender, telling her to follow a set of mysterious instructions—or risk her dark secret getting out. Soon she finds herself part of a group of teens with secrets of their own, who are all under the thumb of the same anonymous texter. And if they don’t find a way to stop the blackmailer, their perfect futures will go up in flames.

This dark, emotionally resonant contemporary YA novel is perfect for fans of We Were Liars (sorry, but no) and The Secret History.

**

I read Playlist for the Dead last year and I really enjoyed it. That’s why I was so excited for the new book by Michelle Falkoff. Sadly, it was my biggest disappointed of the year.

For starters, the summary tells the whole story, there was no surprise, not even the identity of the Blocked Sender (for me).

I’ve read MANY stories about characters struggling with panic attacks, but Kara is the only character I couldn’t connect with. I understood her, but that didn’t make me like her. She was too “plain” she never made me feel anything.

The lack of connection wasn’t the worst thing about this book. The problem started when the mystery began, it didn’t feel realistic, I found it overreacted. Honestly, I wasn’t able to keep reading.

I don’t like to DNF books, I almost never do. I just didn’t care about Pushing Perfect.

The premise was good, the characters were okay, but there wasn’t anything that made me want to keep reading it.

I gave this book 2.5 or 3 stars, just because I didn’t totally hated it. I just don’t care about it.