Hello everyone!

I am back with another book review, Aura in LaLaLand by Skye Grace. Thank you so much to the author for sending me a copy of this book for an honest review. As always, all opinions are my own.

Unfortunately, I could not finish this book.

I wanted to love this book - I really did. There were all the makings of a great story, I just couldn't get into it.

The story basically follows Aura, first just before her seventeenth birthday, and then the story jumps 13 Going on 30 style to her 26th birthday.

In this time, Aura has gone from slightly annoying, but otherwise decent 16 year old to a mean, name calling TV star a decade later. I couldn't tell you why she jumped to that age, or if she ends up back at 17 because I didn't make it that far.

I think the biggest problem I had with this book was the writing style. The perspective itself is in third person present tense, which threw me for a bit of a loop. I think third person has its uses, but this story would have been easier to get into in first person. The storyline is hard enough to get into without the added barrier of third person narration. I also felt like the present tense was a strange choice, I'm okay with it, but I think with the third person it created a narrative that was hard to follow. I found there was a lot of description of things, telling what was happening and not a lot of showing. This writing style makes it difficult to get into any story.

I was excited for the Alice in Wonderland twist the story promised, but in the parts that I had read, there wasn't much more than a themed party and a platter of tarts. Perhaps the rest of the story will include further references to emphasize the AiW elements.

There was a lot of fandom references, some of which I got (I loved the Supernatural-esque show) and others went right over my head. I think part of the problem was I didn't know what year either of the storylines was set in, the later one apparently had DVDs instead of tapes, so I'm guessing early 2000s but I'm not sure.

Overall, the idea for this book was good, but I think there were some errors in the narrative style that made it difficult to read.