I can sort of understand her reaction, she does have a lot to lose, but at the same time every problem she has could have been avoided if she’d stopped and talked to her friends. Olivia is introduced as being the girl that everyone should want to be, but she comes across as a bit of a whiner. I have to admit, this isn’t the kind of book I’d have picked up as a kid. The only moment when one of the problems felt like a genuine problem was when she had a fight with her best friend.

There really wasn’t any big fall for Olivia to take the kid that mocked her was already established as being a bit of a jerk, her manager was quickly established as being a control freak and an opportunist, and the shallow romance interest guy that she lost was acknowledged as shallow from his first introduction. A lot of seemingly insignificant things were gone over multiple times, but that lends an idea of the kind of kid that Olivia is to the narration. Quite a bit is said but aside from the set up for Olivia’s Wacky Water commercial, not much happens. The first, roughly, half of the book is back story and setting Olivia up for her big fall. Then, she starts to rethink everything and finds that she likes what she sees. She’s stuck feeling as if her life is spiraling out of control with no one to talk to and her agent pressuring her to fix her face immediately.

The zit stresses her out and becomes more zits. Olivia has it all, great friends, good looks, and a job as an actress doing commercials. I’ll admit that I was a little surprised to get three books from one request, but I was also more surprised that all three were aimed squarely at readers “twelve and up.” So, I’m not the target audience once again, but when have I let that stop me? So here’s ZiTFACE from a college kid’s perspective. ZiTFACE by Emily Howse is one of three books that I recently got from Marshall Cavendish.

Zitface by Emily Howse