No Shelf Control

By Ann Liang

Thanks so much to Netgalley and HarperCollins Press for giving me a complimentary eARC upon my request for review considerations!! All opinions are my own.

Rating

4.5/5 Stars

Review

Do you ever just wish you were someone else? If one day you just woke up in the body of the person who had everything you wanted, everything you ever dreamed of? Maybe it would end horribly, but maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad. Ann Liang explores this concept in her latest young adult novel, I Am Not Jessica Chen. Everything always seems so perfect as an outsider. Sometimes it seems that everything is going right for everyone else while your world odd falling apart. For Jenna Chen, life seems to be falling apart, at least according to her father. While she’s gotten rejected from every Ivy League, her cousin, Jessica, just received her latest Ivy League acceptance from Harvard. Wishing that she could be little more like her cousin, she suddenly wakes up to a different reality. Jessica Chen’s reality. While at first it may seem like paradise, she begins to wonder where the real Jessica Chen is and if she will ever be herself again.

I Am Not Jessica Chen wonderfully blends contemporary themes with a side of the supernatural to create a powerful novel that explores the pressures of teenage life and the reality of living another persons life. Liang also combines themes of loneliness and expectation, while interweaving Asian culture and representation. Liang truly creates a powerful novel narrative when it comes to allowing readers to truly understand the modern teenage experience. Not only does this novel keep the reader entertained with the mystery behind Jenna’s “situation,” the constant pressures portrayed truly made me love this novel. Liang’s careful depiction of Asian parenting also allow for a true and respectful approach to allowing an outsider to better understand the culture and traditions they might not be familiar with. I Am Not Jessica Chen truly is a novel that is just as powerful as it is entertaining. With meaningful themes and complex, multifaceted characters, I Am Not Jessica Chen is a wonderful novel that explores perfection and the implications of striving for it.

Thoughts

Maybe everything does always seem a little more perfect from the outside than the inside does it not? Or maybe we truly are just self-deprecating creatures, wallowing in our own self-pity and romanticizing all of the lives we don’t live.

FYI, I closed my book to write this.