Theodora Twist

MELISSA SENATE

I read an ARC of The Love Goddess' Cooking School in 2010, and I liked it so much that I put Melissa Senate on my list of authors to ready everything by. Since then I've picked up four more of her books, but this is the first one I've gotten around to reading. Theodora Twist is a YA novel, and I've kind of drifted away from YA over the last two or three years, so I wasn't sure how well I'd like it, but it was quite enjoyable.

Theodora is a 16 year old actress who's Hollywood star is quickly rising, almost as fast as her wild reputation. She's wrapping up a press junket for her new movie, and fielding questions from reporters eager to know more about her relationship with the Bellini brothers, twin singers who she is dating. Yes, she's dating both of them. At the same time. In private of course. To the reporters she keeps insisting “We're just good friends”. Until she gets fed up with the questions and causes a sensation which infuriates her agent.

Emily Fine is a 16 year old high school student, living an ordinary life in an ordinary town with her mother, stepfather and baby sister. She happens to live in the house Theodora grew up in, and for a few weeks in junior high she and Theodora were good friends, until Theodora dumped her with no explanation.

Now Theodora is coming back to her home town to live with Emily and her family for a month. She's to attend high school with Emily and do everything she does, like a normal teenager. It's for a reality show designed to show America that at heart, Theodora IS just like every other teenage girl in America.

The book is written in first person POV, with the chapters alternating between Theodora and Emily. I was a little jarred at first, with Theodora talking about her sex life which began at 12 or 13. But other than their life styles, the girls' voices aren't much different, and a couple of times I had to pause to remember which one was narrating at that moment.

As with any teen novel, there is a small clique of mean girls, here known as the Samanthas, though only two of the four are actually named Samantha. I can't remember much to distinguish the one Samantha from the other, but whenever a Samantha was talking to Emily or Theodora, I pictured Dalia (played wonderfully by Carly Chaikin) from the TV show Suburgatory.

I can't say how well the average teenage girl would like this book as neither of my girls would've been interested in it - one of them only liked serious books with a strong female antagonist facing hardship and/or adversity, and the other didn't read much of anything other than the first few Pretty Little Liars books. But overall I found it to be a very enjoyable and amusing read.

(I received this book through Book Mooch.)