Antisocial by Jillian Blake- Don't Want To Look, Can't Look Away!

Antisocial

When Anna is unceremoniously dumped by her jock boyfriend, she's stunned-- and kind of screwed.  You see, she dumped her friends when she met Palmer, so now no one's talking to her.  To make things worse, she has Social Anxiety Disorder-- and anxiety around Alexandria Prep Academy is about to go to a new level.

Right as Anna's working on getting her friends back, someone hacks the school's app and gains access to everything on everybody's phones.  At first it's just the popular crowd that gets exposed-- but soon enough, no one is safe from having the contents of their phones dumped on a website for all to see.

Antisocial is not a boring book.  I mean, every five minutes someone's deepest, darkest secret is being exposed.  It was almost something that I wanted to look away from, but couldn't.  It's definitely a cautionary tale to teens and young adults, telling them that some personal things are better to be left off of digital devices.

At first, I wasn't sure about Anna.  I didn't really like her, and I didn't like the way she presented Social Anxiety Disorder.  I don't have SAD, so I can't speak to the authenticity of the portrayal, but for having spent time in an in-patient treatment center and now going through an EXTREMELY stressful situation (without the help of any drugs), she seemed oddly non-anxious.

Once the phone leaks started happening though, this book got GOOD.  It was one bombshell secret after another, to the point where I was cringing every time a new one was dropped.  I'd be lying if I didn't say that I like reading about the drama-- but at some point I realized there IS a thing as knowing too much about people.  At some point I wanted to scream "no more!!".

There aren't very many likable characters in this book.  I didn't care for Anna's personality and her friends weren't much better.  Radhika (Anna's former bestie) was a character I thought could have been my favorite-- but it turned out she never she never turned that corner for me.  She was just another mean girl in a book full of them.

The one character that pissed me off more than any of them was a dude named Timmy Tepper.  He capitalized off of the leaks by podcasting every lurid detail, making sure no one missed one juicy secret of his classmates.  Every time he made an appearance, my blood pressure went up.  Pure disgust.

I do have to say I felt like as terrible as the things that got exposed in this book were-- the characters were extremely lucky that it was happening to everybody.  Not saying that it still wouldn't hurt and be humiliating, but the fact that everyone was having their secrets splashed around had to be better than being singled out.  I was sort of relieved for them in a weird way.

The ending was-- okay.  I felt like the mystery aspect of this book was just MEH.  Very anti-climactic. The person who did it isn't a surprise, and there's not a big twist or gotcha moment.  Many things are left undone and unanswered.  I wanted more.

OVERALL: I liked this book despite not really loving the main character.  The best part of this book is the DRAMA and the "don't want to look, but can't look away" secrets that are revealed about EVERYBODY.  Seriously, every single person in this book suffers from too much exposure.  It was sad, but also OMG so salacious.

Date Published: 5/16/2017
How I got this book: Thanks to Penguin Random House for providing me a copy to read and honestly review.
Publisher: Delacorte Press

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My Rating: 3.5/5

Character: Anna Soler
Book: The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart

• Anna and Ruby are really nothing alike, but Anna would be able to relate to the mental health aspects of the book.  Plus, being over-exposed and public humiliation is definitely something Ruby deals with.