REVIEW for The List

Thank you to Scholastic Canada for giving me a copy of this book (thanks for the goodie bag Nikole!).


TITLE:                The List


AUTHOR:           Siobhan Vivian


GENRE:              YA

I have read Siobhan Vivian’s previous novel and was thrilled to read ‘the List’.

A few thoughts came to mind as I was reading this book.  Firstly, Vivian’s books are always so vivid and incredibly difficult to read (for me anyway).  Why?  Because they are so true – they touch the areas where I feel the most vulnerable and then, take the storyline even further – by playing out human nature’s true self.

Wow! That sounded kind of deep, but that is how I felt when I read The List.

Can you imagine being a teenage girl in high school (which is hard enough to begin with) only to discover that some mysterious person has created the List.  What is on this list? the names of 8 girls who have been ranked either pretty or not, in each class grade.

I can’t imagine the horror of finding your name on that list – under the ‘ugliest’ category.

However, the author takes it one step further and examines the lives of 8 girls who have been ‘put’ on that list – the pretty ones AND the ugly ones.  While you might think that the pretty ones ‘have it made’, the author does an amazing job of showing us just how being labeled – one way or the other can affect who you are, how you feel and how you act.

I cringed as I read this book – because there is so much truth to the stories told here.  The pretty girls discover that they may not be all that pretty after all and the ugly girls discover that there is more to life than just your face – actually, this is kind of the morale of the book, in a round about way.

What a wonderful book to read if you are a young adult who does not believe that you fit it anywhere.  This book, while incredibly difficult, was also kind of uplifting in a way.  The writing is frank and, at times, raw, which simply gives the author and her storyline all that much more credibility.