This book was just not for me. I did not finish it. Main character was too annoying. Could not stick with it. Sorry.

First of all thank you to Net Galley and Roaring Brook Press for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had such high hopes for Kind of a Big Deal after reading the intro summary, but sadly this novel is all over the place and not in an enjoyable way. The plot starts strong- Josie Pie, an 18 year old failed-actress decides to run away/get employed as a nanny and move to Montana; but that is where the plot falls apart. In order to distract herself from "peaking in high school", she befriends a guy who works in a bookstore and recommends novels for her to read. With each novel recommendation, Josie literally enters that imaginary world and has to navigate her way out. That trope may work for one plot turn but having Josie continue falling "into" stories is just bizarre.

I understand Hale is a well known and published author both in the young adult and romance categories; however the writing is so simplistic I would consider this a middle grade book (3rd-6th grade) instead of the targeted audience of 7th-9th graders.

I loved the idea behind this book but it just didn't quite work for me. The plot seemed more juvenile than a YA book but the characters were definitely closer to adults. The first 25% of the book was quick and interesting but it went downhill from there in terms of the pacing and plot. The ending of the book was very rushed and not well thought out, and downright confusing. Some younger middle grade readers may enjoy this taste of YA book that has a younger voice to it. This reminded me a lot of Christine Riccio's writing.

What can I say about Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale? Well, when I first read the synopsis I was very intrigued by the story. It seems pretty interesting and I wanted to try it out. I ended up reading some reviews on it and saw a lot of bad ones, but because I loved Austenland I wanted to give this one a chance. I was not a fan.

Josie is our POV and was kind of a big deal in high school. She was an amazing actress in plays and her teacher pretty much convinced her and her mother that she should drop out of school and move to NYC for Broadway. This teacher had connections in Broadway and knew Josie would be a hit. Josie ends up leaving her boyfriend and best friend for NYC. It is nothing like she thought it would be. Audition after audition and she never got a call-back. She ends up becoming a nanny and then moving with this family to Montana.

In Montana, she feels like she is washed up and has no friends. Her boyfriend hasn’t made time to talk to her and her best friend is always busy. Josie ends up turning to books and something strange starts happening while she reads. There is growth with Josie. She realizes that she needs to grow up and stop living in her high school past. But even with this growth, I didn’t really like Josie or any of the other characters. I just couldn’t connect with any of them, and I wasn’t interested in the story. Shannon’s humor was all in this story, which I enjoyed, but this book just wasn’t for me. I will always love Austenland though.

As an avid reader myself, the plot for Kind of a Big Deal by Shannon Hale really appealed to me. Who wouldn’t want to jump into the books they are reading, even for a short time? That’s what the main character, Josie Pie, finds herself doing throughout the book. After dropping out of high school for a failed theater career in New York City, Jose finds herself working as a nanny in Michigan. Through her story visits, she learns to cope with her issues with her friends, family, and failure.

To be honest, I didn’t find Josie to be a very likable character. Maybe that was the author’s intent, but I found myself disliking her for a multitude of reasons. From her arrogant view of herself in high school, to her negligence of the child she was supposed to be caring for, I just couldn’t get past it. And honestly, I didn’t really care for her friends, family, and the theater teacher either. Nobody in the book (except the little girl Mia) was exceptionally nice.

Overall, I would recommend this book to students looking for fantasy and who are really into theater, but I personally didn’t enjoy it, and found myself skimming through some of the scenes of her living in her books. And even the parts that were “real” were not very realistic to me. So, while I didn’t really enjoy it, I know that there are young adults that will.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I always love Hale's feminist perspective on the world and how she creates characters that show young women that they do not need to be rescued. Girls have the power to lead. Always. I also loved the relationship between Josie and her charge, Mia. Mia is an especially vivid character that is impossible not to love. I wanted to like this story more, but I found that the fantasy elements felt forced and didn't help further the story of Josie and the need for her to grow up and figure out life beyond high school.

Thank you to Roaring Brook Press for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book's description is so intriguing that I couldn't help but be interested. Unfortunately, while the premise is undeniable, the resulting book is everything you wish was forgettable.

Any reader wishes they could literally fall into their favorite books, but with tale - I can't help but wonder why this character. The lead character Josie is unlikable, the struggles she deals with aren't relatable, and I found myself rooting against her quickly.

The premise here is phenomenal but the book falls flat.

Unfortunately, Shanon missed the mark with this book. I was excited to read, but it ended up being disjointed for me. I got what the book was trying to accomplish just not a direct hit.

"Josie let out a breath that she didn't know she'd been holding. And since people only did that in books, this was another irrefutable piece of evidence that she was, in fact, in a book."

That's right, our main character, stage name Josie Pie, has found a way to literally escape her peaked-too-early, careening-downhill life by jumping into books. Who among us could say we blame her? Life is hard. Life for a failed thespian is really hard. Life for a failed thespian high school dropout who blew her big break but still can't really believe it and is now buried in debt and licking her emotional wounds in nearly complete isolation as a nanny in Montana ... is really, really hard. So escapism it is! This is fine! Everything's fine! Until you try to escape from the escapism...

This is a fun, lively, super campy YA book that was just a bit too much for me — just one or two layers too deep in indulgent authorial cheekiness and one or two book jumps too long in Josie's journey to self-awareness. I think I would've loved it if it were pared back a little (and perhaps packaged as a novella, but I know that's a far less marketable product). Musical theater kids in particular and people with a higher tolerance for brash, campy humor in general might very well love this. The representation of the different genres in the book jumps are done really well (including historical romance, dystopia, and a graphic novel set right in the middle of the book!). The narrator's voice is hilarious, even if it goes just a little overboard for me, and there are a number of genuinely surprising and funny scenes and developments. (I laughed in delight when Anne and some cows from Green Gables made a gallant appearance.)

Content notes: some body-shaming references to large-chested "trophy wives" (but body-positive comments about a transgender friend), anxiety in a five-year-old, divorce and latch-key kid in the background, brief flashback to assualt of a transgender character

My thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for a digital #ARC of #KindOfABigDeal.

2.5/5 Stars

** I was provided with an E-ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review**

I really wanted to love this, the initial concept had me intrigued. The execution was not great. I found myself asking a couple of times while reading " what is the point of this book". I just didn't understand the purpose. Sure there were moments where I felt for our main character but It wasn't enough to connect to the book. I will say it was a very easy and quick read, unfortunetly it just wasn't for me.

Looking at reviews, it seems like I'm the only one who liked this book!? I thought it was super cute and fun.

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙄 𝙇𝙞𝙠𝙚𝙙:
-The whole concept was a Broadway nerd and book lovers dream.
-SO unique
-I LOVED Mia and how she dealt with (what I assume) was some form of OCD stemming from her mom always being out of town.
-I loved how we got to know all of the side characters through the parts they played in Josie's adventures.

𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙄 𝘿𝙞𝙙𝙣'𝙩 𝙇𝙞𝙠𝙚:
-Got a little repetitive at times.
-The ending was a little abrupt.

This will be spoilery.

One thing I've noticed about Shannon Hale is that she strikes out in different directions with her books, instead of writing the same winning story over and over, with slightly differing trappings.

In this latest novel, teenage Josie Pie was a high school drama star who left school for a one-shot audition on Broadway, blew it, and ended up in Montana as a live-in nanny for a small girl. We never learn how anyone in their right mind would hire a totally inexperienced teen to be a live-in nanny, and it could be argued that that's really not what the story is about, but this kind of underscores what I felt went wrong here: there was a short story, or at most a novelette, worth of material stretched out into a novel, peopled with one-dimensional characters who played spear carriers to Josie's quest for stardom.

If this had been a short story, I would have loved it to pieces: early on, Josie visits a bookstore, and at the park, while her charge is playing, she falls into a book and finds herself in the story world of a historical romance complete with thieves and pirates. This section was absolutely hilarious--I kept laughing out loud, though I kept worrying about how long she was gone, leaving a small child effectively alone in a public park. But when Josie fell back into herself only two minutes later, I breathed with relief and looked forward to her growing up and getting on with her life . . .

To find the same experience repeated again, and again, the only substantive difference the genre of the story she falls into. And when Josie returns from each story world, she's right back to bemoaning her lost chance at stardom, and her non-communicating boyfriend, who she's convinced is two-timing her, and her bestie who is distancing her. (Can we blame her?)

I ended up putting the book down more and more frequently in favor of something else, until days turned into weeks, then months. When I returned to it at last, it was more with determination to get it finished than with pleasurable anticipation. By then the problems outweighed the pleasures, in spite of it being delightful on the sentence level: there did not seem to be enough story there to carry an entire novel.

Josie is whiny and self-absorbed, and though she appears to learn some home truths at the end, they felt a bit sermony, handed to her by the narrative voice instead of truly earned. The boyfriend shows up at last, true and blue for a happy ending, but still everything is all about her--we don't know him as a character any more than we did at the start. The nanny job is window dressing until we're told that Josie adores the kid at the end, but again it felt like the authorial hand firmly pushing us toward a rosy ending.

This book is aimed at a young audience, who might find the story charming in its present form. Hale's writing certainly invites enjoyment. It's the plot and the character development that failed for me. I reached the happy ending feeling mostly relief that at last it was done.

This book had a very intriguing premise - our protagonist finds herself inside of the books she reads. The book was interesting and the main character did develop and grow, but it took a while. A bit of this book felt repetitive. Josie was the star of her high school’s drama program and when her drama teacher secures her an audition for a real Broadway show she drops out of high school and chases her dream. She becomes completely stuck after she is quickly dismissed and realizes being a star in high school does not mean you’ll be a star in the real world. Overall this was an enjoyable book and a nice escape.

The concept of "falling" into a book is so appealing, especially to book lovers, but somehow Shannon Hale makes the whole thing so strange.

Josie is not the most likeable main character. She is super self-centered and obnoxious and so stuck on the past, it is annoying. I really couldn’t stand her mentioning that she was “kind of a big deal” over and over. Do people actually think like this? Is her life at all relatable to a teen? Some aspects, maybe, but I can’t see most readers actually liking Josie.

But even more than that, the books she falls into are just… odd. They aren’t compelling and it takes ages for her to get through each story and then it doesn't really tie into the “real life” side of the plot. I'm also not sure about Josie diving into these stories and leaving Mia all alone. Time doesn’t work the same, but it still makes Josie come across irresponsible.

Also the ending where it’s revealed what is actually happening is just so far out there that I’m not sure what to think.

I almost quit reading this book for a number of reasons, but I kept reading because while it is weird, it’s one of those weird moments where you just can’t look away. I wanted to see how the great Shannon Hale pulled off that ending, and while it wasn’t a terrible ending, it just didn’t satisfy me.

I don’t really know if I can recommend this or not because it’s one of those elusive stories that transcends genre and rating systems and just books in general.

A sweet YA coming of age story, Kind of a Big Deal follows Josie whose big dream is to make it big on Broadway. The story starts when things start falling apart and she decides to return to her small town to regroup and rediscover her purpose in life. It has been so long since I read a Shannon Hale book, my first being Princess Academy and Goose Girl, so I went into this book with a lot of expectations. The story has a target audience and Josie's voice as the narrator comes through incredibly clearly which made it easy to feel connected to her character. However, my biggest problem was her lack of character growth - Josie remains pretty rooted in her "big dream" mentality and rather than growing/learning from her setbacks, spends a good chunk of the book bemoaning her situation. This took a bit of the enjoyment out of the story despite personally really loving the fantasy concept of jumping into stories. Ultimately, this came down to a decision of preference - I think Shannon Hale is still an amazing author and knows how to grasp the attention of younger readers and I understand that I'm not the target audience for the book. I think someone in their teens might have been able to relate a lot better to Josie throughout the story which in the end would make the story more enjoyable overall.

*The review below is being done on a Netgalley Advanced Reader's Copy of Kind of a Big Deal. This review is my own, and I have written it in my honest opinion.

The first time I read Shannon Hale was in middle school, my book of choice- Princess Academy. I must admit that other than that series world I have not kept up with Hale, so when I got the opportunity to read Kind of a Big Deal I was excited at the prospect.

Kind of a Big Deal revolves around Josie Pie, a popular high schooler who has her heart set on Broadway, not to mention the voice to get her there. When Josie drops out of high school to take her shot on Broadway, she realizes that she may not be cut out for that life after all. In order to avoid returning to her hometown in Arizona, Josie becomes a nanny and moves to Missouri with her new employers. We follow Josie on her journey as she tries to overcome loneliness, heartbreak, and shame.

This book has so many things that I want to discuss because I feel that it has a lot of potential, so please keep in mind that although the small summary I gave in the previous paragraph sounds like it is a Realistic Fiction book, it actually falls into the Fantasy genre. What I didn't mention earlier was that Josie Pie tries to take up reading as a hobby, but as she tries to read a book she ends up going into the actual story, literally. As she continues to story-jump she finds that it is becoming harder and harder to return to the "real world."

I really wanted to love this book, but I had a hard time staying engaged with the story. The plot line became very repetitive in that Josie would get sucked into a story, she would see familiar faces playing the characters, and then she would try to get back home. This cycled at least three or four times even though the genre of the book would change. In addition to the repetitiveness, Josie was a very difficult character to love because for the majority of the book she didn't grow as a character; she was stuck in the mindset of "I'm kind of a big deal," and "I shouldn't be going through this setback." As much as I tried to sympathize for her, I just couldn't feel bad for Josie because I felt she created those conflicts for herself.

Finally, the ending of the book felt very rushed because Josie was battling her demons head on in one moment and then before you knew it, the story ended. (I know this sounds vague, but I do not want to give spoilers). I feel that a character should have flaws, and believe me Josie does, but the way the flaws combine with the story make it very frustrating to get through.

I am still a fan of Shannon Hale's, but this was not one of my favorite books of the year. Kind of a Big Deal will be released on August 25, 2020.

I wanted to love this book. I really like Shannon Hale's writing and style. This book totally missed the mark for me and was lacking all the things I have admired in the past when it comes to Hale's books. I thought the plot was underdeveloped and there were times when I considered DNFing the whole thing. I kept reading, hoping it would get better... not the right book for this reader.

Shannon Hale's latest novel for young adults is a fun, thoughtful tale. Kind of a Big Deal refers to Josie Sergakis who was a big deal in her small town high school. She was the star of every school drama production since her freshman year and even voted most promising rising star in a national competition. So she should expect to make it big on Broadway, right? Josie changes her name too Josie Pie (taking her loving boyfriend's last name), drops out of high school and heads to her first audition. It did not go well nor did any of the others. She's maxed out her credit card, texts from her high school bff and her boyfriend are becoming few and far between. The last thing she wants to do is return home a "failure." Fortunately, her babysitting job turns full time, the only catch is, she has to move to Missoula, Montana. She adores five-year-old Mia and welcomes the chance to take a break from the endless stream of cattle calls, so to Montana she goes. Mia's mom is working in Nairobi so Josie's job is full time. After settling in, Josie takes Mia into town where she meets a kind, pun-free barista and goes to fabulous bookstore staffed by gorgeous young men and women. . While Mia plays happily at the train table, Josie embarrasses herself in front of a group of book club women and trips and falls, banging her head. A dreamy bookseller helps her up and recommends a steamy romance novel to take her mind off things. At the playground, after getting the brushoff from some snooty college nannies, Josie opens her book while Mia play with their charges. Its not a typical book. As Josie reads on, she's transported - not figuratively, but actually into the book. Taking up with a Robin Hood=esque troop of bandits, she realizes they resembles the people of Missoula as well as her bff, Nina, and boyfriend Justin. She belts out her best Broadway hits, falls in love with the head bandit and is becoming absorbed in this fantasy life. Concerned for Mia, Josie returns to real life to find no time has passed at all. Josie finds herself in other books including gory zombie apocalypse story, Josie has to figure out why this is happening and what it has to do with all the choices she must make in her life.

Shannon Hale has written another fun, funny romance book for young adults. Reading about Josie and her trials certainly gives food for thought for those trying move on from high school and decide what they would like to do with their lives , and who they would like to be. I recommend this for young adults and adults of any age. The romance was light enough to make this suitable for middle schoolers as well. I appreciate the opportunity to read the ARC.

This book would make a really good movie as it jumps around from the main story to other scenarios as she dives into books. But the author keeps it very plain where she is, so it is not confusing for the reader. This is a YA book and it is very apparant in the writing and the story. The theme or lesson of the book is make VERY clear, although I am an adult reading it--teens might need the nudge the author give. It is a quick and exciting read when she is in the books.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eArc to read and review.

I love Shannon Hale and I am a fan of most of her books. I really wanted to love this book to especially because it has Montana and I live in Montana and it would be great for my kids! However, I think some kids will love this book and devour it and they will not be bothered by the main character's attitude. They will enjoy it for the easy teen drama read that it is. However, others like myself will find themselves annoyed at time with the main character and the way she acts and thinks. Overall it was an okay read and wasn't the worst book I have read but it wasn't up to Shannon Hale's usual standards.