Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia (2017)

Eliza is a mystery to everyone, including herself. At school, no one dares talk to her, and at home, where her family is obsessed with all things sports, her parents assume all of her reclusive behavior is due to a “teenage thing.” Yet, inside her room, she is the mastermind behind the worldwide famous comic series, Monstrous Sea. The very people who call her weird at school are huge fans of her work, not knowing who she is. At the beginning of her senior year, Eliza meets Wallace, who not only wants to talk to her, but is a huge fan of Monstrous Sea. As their friendship turns into something more, Wallace starts confiding in Eliza all of his secrets, but she’s still hiding the fact that she’s the author of Monstrous Sea. Deeper and deeper their relationship goes and Eliza must decide when she wants to stop hiding.

Right of the bat, the premise of Eliza and Her Monsters remind me a lot of Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. In both books, the main characters are behind successful webstories/comics, but after reading them both, that’s really the only similarity I found between the two. Originally, I had no plans on reading this book but ultimately decided to pick it up because I heard a lot of good things about the portrayal of mental illness within the story. However, I found that this book lacked depth and failed to discuss mental illness properly.

One of the biggest barriers for me to enjoy this series was the main character, Eliza. Usually, me not connecting with a character doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the story, but I just couldn’t find anything appealing about Eliza. Eliza suffers from anxiety, which I thought could’ve been a great aspect of this book, but instead it felt really disingenuous. It seemed like her character arc wasn’t written to have anxiety. There would be long periods of time where the author forgot that Eliza had anxiety and then would quickly throw in something that would make her anxious.

On the other hand, I really did like Wallace. However, I view him more as a side character instead of a main character, which is what I think he’s supposed to be. Yes, I think that his background was an unnecessary plot that needed to be explored more in order for it to have true relevance to the story. I found this happening a lot in this book: unnecessary plotlines were added that added more confusion than clarity to the plot. Still, I enjoyed that Wallace called Eliza out when Eliza was being really ridiculous. Eliza’s parents were complete enablers to her behavior, and Wallace was the only one that truly recognized that what Eliza was doing was unhealthy.

Nonetheless, there was still some things I enjoyed about Eliza and Her Monsters. One of those things was the was Eliza and Wallace’s relationship was written. Basically, Wallace had a lot of experience with relationships while Eliza had none. Instead of Wallace seeing this as a negative, he saw it as an honor, that he was the one Eliza was experiencing all these things with. In general, Eliza’s parents were pretty terrible except for when it came to Eliza’s relationship with Wallace. Although the scene was written to be pretty awkward, I appreciated that Eliza’s mom, with no condensation, had a talk with Eliza about using protection. Yes!

I’ll be honest, I had a lot of problems with Eliza and Her Monsters but still enjoyed reading it overall.

3 Stars