Her story is a phenomenon. Her life is a disaster.
In the real world, Eliza Mirk is shy, weird, and friendless. Online, she’s LadyConstellation, the anonymous creator of the wildly popular webcomic Monstrous Sea. Eliza can’t imagine enjoying the real world as much as she loves the online one, and she has no desire to try.
Then Wallace Warland, Monstrous Sea’s biggest fanfiction writer, transfers to her school. Wallace thinks Eliza is just another fan, and as he draws her out of her shell, she begins to wonder if a life offline might be worthwhile.
But when Eliza’s secret is accidentally shared with the world, everything she’s built—her story, her relationship with Wallace, and even her sanity—begins to fall apart (synopsis taken from goodreads.com)Â
I saw this book all over instagram and for a while I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pick it up, but I did and I really liked it.
The beginning of the story was hard to get into because I don’t relate to Eliza in many ways. Eliza is a very anxious person, which I CAN relate too. But Eliza gets very anxious during social situations or at school, in face she dreads these two things more than anything. I on the other, love school and I thrive in any social scene.  Eliza doesn’t like going outside and prefers to sit on her computer in her bedroom. I go to sleep away camp in the woods all summer and love being disconnected. But at the same time, I love my computer and phone more than anything.
The more I read into the story the more I felt like I connected to Eliza in other ways and almost wished I could be friends with her. Eliza is loyal, creative and fierce. While the kids in her school don’t see that, her online friends and her new friend Wallace sure does.  Her brothers understand to some extent her devotion to the online community she has created for herself, but her parents are very clueless as to why this matters to her so much.
This is something a lot of people can relate to now, our parents or grandparents don’t understand why our lives on the internet matter to us so much and theres no way we can explain it to them so that they can grasp it.
I enjoyed the characters but did find myself getting annoyed with Eliza on many occasions. I felt like she wasn’t a very deep character and I would have liked to know a lot more about her as a person and not her as just the creator of this webcomic.
I did like how throughout the novel, we were given illustrations of what the webcomic would look like so this way we could follow along to some extent what was going on and what Eliza’s work looked like.
There definitely was character development for both Eliza and Wallace which was really nice to see.
This book wasn’t my favorite thing ever. I did enjoy it, I guess I just don’t have very strong feelings on it. I do see why it was a must read over the summer, I guess it just didn’t do it for me.