Geekerella by Ashley Poston

Title: Geekerella
Author: Ashley Poston
Publication Date: April 4, 2017

Rating: 8/10

What I Liked:

• It’s Cinderella. Geekerella, as you can probably tell from the title, is a fairy tale retelling and I love fairy tale retellings. I actually studied the motifs in Cinderella for a school project, so I always enjoy reading Cinderella retellings especially.
• Elle and Darien’s phone conversations. If a book has the two characters messaging each other often, I’m basically hooked already. Also, how they started messaging each other and why they kept it up actually made sense. Often, it can seem completely unrealistic, but Poston was able to make it seem completely reasonable.
• Sage, Elle’s “fairy godmother.” I really like how their friendship develops, and I love how Sage is so not like the original fairy godmother.
• The fandom of it all. I really enjoy books that have characters who are really into a fandom, because that makes them relatable.
• The cover. Not for reasons as shallow as you may be expecting, I loved the cover. Sure, it’s purple, and the words are sparkly and it’s pretty. But more importantly, it is a representation of the story. The front is Elle, with Sage, where she works, and the back is Darien at work in his Starfield outfit. But the little details are what really push the cover over the edge into awesomeness: Darien is holding his phone and appears to be reading a text, probably from Elle; Elle is also looking at her phone and she’s wearing her lanyard from the convention and SHE ONLY HAS ONE SHOE. It’s beautiful. And beneath the dust jacket is just as awesome.
• The ships (my favorite thing about most books, honestly). I loved how the main relationship played out, and I really feel like they were a perfect match.****SPOILERS**** I also really loved that Poston put Cal and Sage together. In addition to adding important LGBT representation, they were super cute. ****END SPOILERS****

What I Didn’t Like:

• How similar Starfield is to Firefly. No hate to Firefly or accusations toward the author intended, but as I was reading the book, I was constantly seeing similarities between the two shows. Not necessarily the fact that they both ended up having a movie a while after the series was canceled, but aspects of the show itself were annoyingly similar.
• Brian. ****SPOILERS**** I was pretty sure it was Brian messing with Darien the whole time, and I was kind of wondering why they didn’t try to contact him and do something about it. Also, just Brian himself. He was a jerk. ****END SPOILERS****

Final Comments: Overall, there wasn’t a lot I didn’t like about the book. I read it in one morning and really enjoyed it. It was somewhat predictable because it’s a fairy tale retelling and they pretty much all end the same, but there was enough that surprised me that it wasn’t boring.