Keep holding on

Disappointed. Boo. I was excited about this book, too. Sigh.

Keep Holding On is a story about bullying. Noelle is bullied by annoying brats at school, and she's bullied by her own mother. Her situation truly sucks. I feel a little weird saying I didn't much like this book, because it did have such a heavy, important topic. Bullying is such a big deal recently, and that's a good thing - the more light that's shed on this issue, the more people will feel safe to stand up against bullying.

But this book, it all fell so flat to me. It wasn't real, it was very preachy, and I don't think it got to the depths of the issue. There were a lot of instances that Colasanti told instead of showed. There were characters that needed developing (for example, I wished we'd gotten to know Ali more, and oh my gosh, Simon rocked so much), and the ending - Noelle's turnaround - felt rushed and not in character at all. As someone who's been bullied, and had trouble standing up for herself, it doesn't happen all at once like that. It comes in bits.

And, finally ... the romance aspect. First of all, Julian ended up being a pretty one-dimensional character. By the end, I don't know who Julian is or what he's about, so it was hard for me to trust him with Noelle in the end. Second, a lot of her “healing” at the end was based on her relationship with him, which isn't healthy. And third, why did there NEED to be a romance aspect at all? Why couldn't Noelle figure out who she was and how to stand up for herself without needing a boy to like her??
I mean, don't get me wrong - I get that after Matt, it was nice for her to realize that a boy could like her for her and not be a liar or be ashamed of her. I just didn't feel like the romance aspect of this book added anything to the story. If anything, it felt like it was added out of necessity, because it's a YA book. If it was going to be in there, it needed to be developed more.

Overall, I wanted more out of this book than it was able to give me. It's becoming a common problem with me. I keep coming back to this issue of, maybe I'm expecting too much?!? Do I want it to be deeper than it can be? But then, you have YA books like TFIOS that blow you away in terms of emotional depth, so, it's definitely possible to have a book written for teenagers that's not dumbed down. And this book was not it.