Rowena’s review of You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis.
Main Character: Lina
Love Interest: Oliver (highlight to see)
Series: None
Author: Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads
It’s been a year since Luna’s mother, the fashion-model wife of a successful film director, was hit and killed by a taxi in the East Village. Luna, her father, and her little brother, Tile, are still struggling with grief.
When Luna goes to clean out her mother’s old studio, she’s stunned to find her mom’s cell phone there—charged and holding seven unheard messages. As Luna begins to listen to them, she learns more about her mother’s life than she ever wanted to know . . . and she comes to realize that the tidy tale she’s been told about her mother’s death may not be the whole truth.
So Luna’s Mom has died and she’s grieving with her father and younger brother Tile. She just turned fifteen and went over to her Mom’s studio to clean it out when she comes across her mother’s cell phone that was charging and has seven messages. Nothing makes sense about her Mom’s death so she’s got questions. She’s hoping that through the messages on her mom’s cell phone, she’ll get some much needed answers but when she starts finding out things she never knew, things change for her in ways she never thought possible.
In this book, we’re in Luna’s head and she’s a 15 year old girl who is mature for her age. She’s lost her Mom but she’s got a good relationship with her Dad and her younger brother Tile. She was really close to her Mom so it was really hard for her to lose her. It’s why she goes digging into her Mom’s death and when things to start coming to the light, it rocks her world off its axis.
Luna’s got a lot of great people in her life. Aside from her family, she meets some friends along the way that are a lot older than she is but kind of adopt her into their lives. Luna isn’t the most perfect of characters and while that is fine and dandy, there were times when I couldn’t connect with her. There were times when I wanted to smack some sense into her, like when she had no business being in places that she shouldn’t have gone by herself. That’s really the jist of my issues with Luna. She was only 15 and even though that is old enough to go off and do things on your own, some of the places she went to by herself (a stranger’s house who happens to be a male) had me shaking my head because so many different things could have happened to her (yes I know that this is a work of fiction) and she’s lucky that nothing did happen.
While I respect why she felt the need to do the things she did, the parent in me wasn’t a fan of some of the things she did. I thought that this was a well written story, the storyline was interesting and it was what grabbed me at first but the characters we meet in the book kept me interested. Luna was great but I loved Tile, Oliver and even her father and the model friend she picks up along the way. It was interesting to peek into the lives of people who can afford to jet off to Italy whenever they please and I was totally jealous of Luna doing just that in this book but I never hated her. She came into her own, in her own time and she went after what she put her mind to and I respected that. I struggled with the story line from time to time, I felt that it lagged a bit in the middle as it was easy for me to put this book down at times but I was glad that I kept with it because it got better and the ending was satisfying so kudos to Stewart Lewis.
..and that’s your scoop!
This book is available from Delacorte.
Buy the book: B&N|Amazon|Book Depository
Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com
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For what you describe, I don’t think I would have been a fan of some stuff she does either.
IT sounds like an interesting premise though! 😛
Hey Alex!
Yeah, I wanted to like this book more than I did and while I did enjoy reading it, there were things that a fifteen year old shouldn’t have been allowed to do and even though she did it behind her father’s back, I still felt like she didn’t have enough parental supervision in her life. My enjoyment suffered because of that and then there were things with Oliver that weren’t fully dealt with and I just wanted more from that whole thing, IMO there wasn’t enough groveling on Oliver’s part. That’s saying something too because I adored Oliver.