Book Review: A Week of Mondays by Jessica Brody

Publisher’s description

When I made the wish, I just wanted a do-over. Another chance to make things right. I never, in a million years, thought it might actually come true…

Sixteen-year-old Ellison Sparks is having a serious case of the Mondays. She gets a ticket for running a red light, she manages to take the world’s worst school picture, she bombs softball try-outs and her class election speech (note to self: never trust a cheerleader when she swears there are no nuts in her bake-sale banana bread), and to top it all off, Tristan, her gorgeous rocker boyfriend suddenly dumps her. For no good reason!

As far as Mondays go, it doesn’t get much worse than this. And Ellie is positive that if she could just do it all over again, she would get it right. So when she wakes up the next morning to find she’s reliving the exact same day, she knows what she has to do: stop her boyfriend from breaking up with her. But it seems no matter how many do-overs she gets or how hard Ellie tries to repair her relationship, Tristan always seems bent set on ending it. Will Ellie ever figure out how to fix this broken day? Or will she be stuck in this nightmare of a Monday forever?

From the author 52 Reasons to Hate My Father and The Unremembered trilogy comes a hilarious and heartwarming story about second (and third and fourth and fifth) chances. Because sometimes it takes a whole week of Mondays to figure out what you really want.

Amanda’s thoughts

At the beginning of the story we see Ellie as someone who is totally devoted to her boyfriend. He takes up most of her time, she’s stopped doing fun things she used to do, pre-Tristan, and she’s a little pathetic. Okay—maybe more than a little. I wrote “BARF” a bunch of times in my notes, frustrated with her fixation of Tristan. But you know that will have to change, especially when Tristan breaks up with her… over and over again.

Ellie gets to live out the “if onlys” that the rest of us can only imagine. She tries some different things to try and change the outcome with Tristan—follows the “rules” for how to keep a man (gee, can you guess what word I wrote by that note? Yep: BARF). She figures if she’s not a “match” for Tristan, as he says, she’ll transform herself into whatever it is he might want. She doesn’t seem to ever grab onto the thought of “what am I supposed to learn from this?” and is just stuck on “how can I better manipulate my desired outcomes?” She thinks the thing that she has to do in these do-overs is to stop the break-up, but really she needs to figure out who she really is and how to live for herself. Once she realizes she’s been focusing on the wrong thing, she’s able to break the curse of it always being Monday.

This was the perfect book to read in the days I was finishing up packing to move. It was super readable, funny, and light (and “light” is not a disparaging term at all). While the story was pretty predictable—because it has to be, by nature of the plot—it was fun to watch Ellie try to figure out what she needed to do differently each Monday. It was also satisfying to watch her grow and change—or maybe it’s more accurate to say she grows and STOPS changing, as in stops trying to change who she is to fit the ideals other people set up for her and to see her become more herself. Fun, cute, and satisfying—even if it takes seven versions of the same day for Ellie to see what readers will be able to see from day one. 

Review copy courtesy of the publisher

ISBN-13: 9780374382704

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publication date: 08/02/2016

Filed under: Book Reviews