"Everybody thinks Syrah is the golden girl. After all, her father is Ethan Cheng, billionaire, and she has everything any kid could possibly desire: a waterfront mansion, jet plane, and custom-designed snowboards. But most of what glitters in her life is fool's gold. Her half-siblings hate her, her best friend's girlfriend is ruining their friendship, and her own so-called boyfriend is only after her for her father's name. When her broken heart results in a snowboarding accident that exiles her from the mountains-the one place where she feels free and accepted for who she is, not what she has-can Syrah rehab both her busted-up knee, "and" her broken heart?
Justina Chen Headley writes with an engaging wit and a powerful, distinct voice. Her first novel, "Nothing But the Truth (and a few white lies) "was a Border's Original Voices nominee, a Book Sense pick, and received a starred review from "Publisher's Weekly: ""Headley makes an impressive debut with this witty, intimate novel.""""""
I love those quotation marks at the end of the synopsis. Totally LOL moment.
Okay. Girl Overboard sounds like a book rich heiress should read. But really, it's a book most people should read. Or maybe not, because it's a four hundred page book that is sort of boring. Okay, I'll admit it. It's boring in the middle part of the book. There's a lot of good stuff in the book (I mean good lessons), but it can be overwhelming to the point of them just giving you an old man's advice on his death bed.
Of course, there wasn't any character that died in the book.
I hate how slow the book went. It was already enough for a book to be four hundred pages, but to have the story go slow? That's too much. It's like "Someone please kill me now" or "I'm going to cheat on this book by reading something else."
On to other subjects of the book. Most of us probably don't know about snowboarding. I know I don't, partially because I live in the area where no one knows how to snowboard. Maybe some of us know, but the majority definitely don't know. And that's another reason to not read this book: Weird words/terminology used by people who snowboard. (Let me think about what I just said). Also people who know some things about snowboarding. It would had been helpful if the author conveniently placed a glossary in the front of the book. (I don't look at the back unless I want to read the acknowledgements).
Bringing in references to people. I wish the author written in some real people, because there's a lot of fake people and that annoys me like crazy. It would be awesome if NPH or Ryan Gosling somehow appeared into the story. Or the snowboarding experts like Shawn...Shawn...er...I don't remember his last name. I think it's White, but I'm too lazy to check. Beside, interent connections is down.
The Chinese words blending in with the English. I can easily understand pingyin (basically the cheat-cheat on pronunciation for lazy Americans). Sometimes it gets irritating because there's a bunch of Chinese words which can be mistakenly taken for one another. (Pingyin gets confusing when it's without the accent marks. Xi and Xi may be referring to a whole bunch of words, like four or death).
The lesson learned at the end of Girl Overboard is adorable, but I don't think it's necessary to mention it, telling the readers (a summary of) what they learned from the story. Heck, I should had skipped to the end and read that part instead of reading the entire story. Would had saved a lot of time.
Syrah is definitely a smart golden girl. She's caring and cautious. She's a unique girl, with a heart of gold. I love how she changes throughout the story, but she has something I'll call dry humor. Humor that exist, but isn't funny.
Rating: Three out of Five
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