Recently, I have read the book Girls Like Me. The author is LoLa Stvil. She is from Haiti, and came to the United States to go to college in Chicago. She focused her studies on creative writing while in college. She is the best selling author of the Guardian series.The genre of this book is fiction and it is 310 pages. I chose this book randomly in the classroom library one day. It looked simple and easy to understand. I ended up liking it and found out that it had more meaning than I ever thought it would.

 

This book is about a teenage girl, named Shay, who is going through a very difficult time.  She is overweight and just lost her father.  She doesn’t face her problems because she gets involved with social media. Shay wants to find a boyfriend and meets this boy name Godtear on social media, so she does not know who he really is. Shay started to talk to him very often. She would make things up about herself that were not true.  She would lie to him about who she was and what she looked like.

 

I was surprised that the book covered such serious topics. When I picked it up I thought it would be about a girl and the silly thoughts that go on in her head.  The text in the book presents in a way that looks poetic and comic like. Instead, this book was about a girl who is trying to deal with the death of her father and threats from a girl bully in her school. She feels safe with an online relationship with a boy. I like the way the author used a dictionary type format  to address struggles teens have today with social media. For example, “Facebook, A public record of all the friends I don’t have”. “Firetrash.com Is a site where hundreds of kids from school feast on judgment and ridicule, a meal I refuse to take part in”(p. 43). I like this type of writing because it is short and to the point. These points are very realistic and send a strong message.

 

I rate this book a 9 out of 10 because it addresses serious topics teen age girls face today in our society with social media. The book does an awesome job of hitting these topics in a direct way.   I would recommend this book for girls between the ages of 12 through 16 because it does have some bad language.