Penny is a very awkward person and she’s always surrounded by people who treat her like she doesn’t matter. Penny decides that instead of writing a journal to talk about her feelings she’s going to start a blog and she’s going to call it Girl Online. The only person that knows about this blog is Elliot – her best friend. When Penny finds herself unexpectedly in New York for Christmas things she never expected to happen start to happen… she meets charming, mysterious, funny and cute Noah and her life changes, she feels herself falling in love. But Noah has a secret too, just like Penny has her blog, and when the truth comes out it might destroy her anonymity, her friendship with Elliot and her love for Noah all in one blow.
I love Zoe Sugg’s YouTube videos and they’ve really helped me feel comfortable in myself; they’ve made me realise that it doesn’t matter what other people think about how I look, because at the end of the day the only person whose opinion on my body that matters is my own. When I first became aware that YouTubers were becoming a thing I didn’t really get the attraction or why it was such a big deal, but I had heard of Zoella so one day I decided to look her up and that made me instantly fall in love with watching YouTubers. I must now subscribe to about 40 of them and they all entertain and inspire me in different ways. So Zoe was the person who introduced me, and many others I think, to the world of YouTube!
I think that I saw this book in a bookshop when it first came out, and I remembered hearing of Zoella so I picked it up and the blurb sounded so good that instantly I wanted to read it! Unfortunately, it’s taken me this long to actually get to reading it!
I understand that Zoe has a very wide following of fans from a very young age up to quite old and she kind of has to cater for all of them, but I didn’t really connect with this book – there wasn’t a lot of storyline happening. Nothing complicated or hard to understand happened. The characters were typical stereotypes of teenagers and I felt it was really, really cheesy. Penny was an over-exaggerated version of clumsy and I think even the clumsiest person in the world would not have some of the things Penny had happen to her happen to them.
I loved Elliot and Noah, though. Elliot was really cool and funny, and I liked how he could just be a best friend without there having to be some deeper romantic meaning to their friendship. I liked the fact that he was gay but it wasn’t really talked about. Some books make too big of a deal out of the fact that they have a gay character and Girl Online wasn’t like that; Elliot was treated just like everyone else, as he should be.
Noah was just so sweet and romantic, but again I feel like he was a bit over-the-top and exaggeratedly romantic – some of the romantic yet cheesy things that happened were almost cringeworthy. I used to be the kind of person who liked cheesy, easy-to-read romance novels that didn’t have a lot going on but then the more complicated YA novels came out such as The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner and I forgot about all the cheesy romance stuff because everything else was just so much more challenging and fun to read and you really had to use your imagination. I found that once I reached the age where I no longer wanted to read books about puppies and vet assistants and wanted something more mature, I instantly went to cheesy romance novels because I felt reading about romance was really mature and cool. I guess everyone deep down hopes that one day they’ll meet a ‘Prince Charming’ but it’s all a delusion – there are some absolutely great people out there who could be potential boyfriends or girlfriends, but I feel as though books like these endow people with unrealistically high expectations of what a guy or girl will be like to go out with. They make you think that if someone doesn’t buy you flowers and take you on romantic picnics by moonlight then they’re not ‘the one’. I think it’s an unhealthy thing to make people think that this is the normal version of ‘love’, because then you’re always going to be disappointed when people don’t behave like fictional characters behave.
3/5 stars.
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