I really wanted to like this YA book but I think it irritated me more than anything. Piper Perish is a high schooler in Houston who dreams of going to art school in NYC with her boyfriend and her best friend when things start to go haywire the last few months of school leading up to graduation. She has a horrible older sister who dominates the family and the twists and turns of her friendships and relationships ultimately control her art and her future. I wound up finding Piper more irritating than those characters that were meant to irritate her. Yes, high schoolers are generally self-centered but she just took the cake for me.

We’ve all dared to dream big, but how many of us actually had a shot at our dreams? Talented young artist and Warhol-aholic Piper Perish is so close to achieving her childhood dream of attending art school in New York City with her two best friends, she can practically taste it. Piper knows that her work is worthy and she can make it big in the NYC art community. But it takes a lot to live out your dreams, and Piper slowly realizes her future as a New York City artist is very precarious.

Told via Piper’s personal diary, the novel follows the protagonist from January to August, chronicling a period of change filled with a major family dilemma and dramatic friendship issues, all leading to the fateful time when Piper should be heading to New York City.

There’s one major problem with the novel: Piper.

As a millennial, I hate it when people fling around the word “entitlement.” It’s grunted like a curse whenever a person under the age of 30 questions something or fights for more and typically, it’s just a ridiculous buzz word meant to shut people up. Piper suffers from actual entitlement, the kind in which you stand for and fight for nothing and still get everything you want. Piper has talent but doesn’t display drive or a sense of personal responsibility. Despite family troubles and twisting friendship dynamics troubling her, I found myself actively rooting against her, hoping life would hand her a powerful wake up call. Instead, you get deus ex machina like you wouldn’t believe. At the end of this novel, I didn’t think that Piper had learned anything, grown as a person, or become better in the wake of her struggles. She’s fairly stagnant as a protagonist and as a narrator, she’s not just unreliable, she’s pretty elitist and spiteful. I didn’t HATE her the whole time, but I’d definitely had enough of her by the end of the novel.

With the exception of best friend Kit, teacher Mrs. Adams, and maybe Piper’s dad, none of the secondary characters are super likeable. They’re presented as continuous problems in Piper’s life, some more viciously than others, and it makes it hard to appreciate them even in the positive moments. There was definitely drama in my teen years, but the amount of drama here is ridiculous. Piper is really unfair to the people in her life. I particularly struggled with the book’s portrayal of Piper’s sister Marli, who has genuine mental issues that are ignored and used to make her look like the ultimate villain with zero redemptive qualities. You could chalk it back up to the unreliable narrator point-of-view, but the narrative technique didn’t work well here. I think any conscious 17-year-old would address the issue with more care.

One thing I loved and didn’t get enough of was the art. Piper and her friends have a really interesting passion and in the few scenes in which it is explored, it’s described beautifully. You see why art brought these friends together and how it shaped their lives. But the pursuit of art and creativity is not super prominent. Unfortunately, Piper spends most of the novel avoiding and procrastinating on her art, only to be praised for it later.

Clearly, the connection with this book just wasn’t there. We were expecting a story about growth, support systems, and the human spirit. There was some of that in there, particularly toward the end, but not nearly enough to make it either heartfelt or genuine. The story flirts with a lot of ideas: creating art, falling in love, the ups and downs of friendship, loving your family while discovering a life beyond them, among others. But the writing just doesn’t commit to bringing these ideas full circle, and I really wish it had.

I’ll end things with a theme explored in the book: Art is subjective. So if Piper’s journey sounds like something you can sink your teeth into, don’t let this review stop you. Books mean different things to different people, so maybe there’s something here for you.

A couple of lovely quotes:

I love painting. I love drawing. I’m never let down, even when the picture isn’t exactly what I want. I can keep working on it. Paintings speak back. They argue. But it’s just because they still want attention. They aren’t done yet.

They want to keep the relationships alive. And when they break your heart, it’s only because they’re that good, not because they’re bad. Bad art can be fixed or transformed. But bad people? Bad choices? I think they’re with us forever.

And:

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” —Twyla Tharp. I get this one deep down. Every time I paint, I feel like I’m not just leaving home, I’m moving closer to something bigger and better than my life.

Though I can’t make any claims to being an artist, I took enough classes to resonate with these thoughts—and to have picked up the book in the first place, anticipating finding myself among artistic teens once again.

For the most part, I did. The book is at its best in the beginning and the end, when the focus is on three friends—our diary narrator, the eponymous Piper Perish, Enzo, her sometime-boyfriend now just friend, and Kit, her BFF.

I liked the glimpses of the other artistic teens in her class, with the Yoda-like teacher, Ms. Adams, swooping in now and then to utter words of wisdom as she exhorts the high school seniors not to revel in senioritis so much that they stop working on their senior projects—and the email exchange with first year conservatory art student Silas, whose word pictures of New York City were actually a lot more vivid than the Texas setting.

Piper, Enzo, and Kit begin senior year determined to get accepted to an elite New York art conservatory. As we get into the year, and their complicated lives, the three musketeers begin to feel fractions in their united front—as of course will happen at a time of life when one is rapidly changing.

I really liked Enzo and Kit. In fact, I liked them a bit more than I liked Piper, whose tendency toward drama llama had a legit source, but that didn’t make it any easier to read about.

I wanted more art, and less of Piper’s dysfunctional family life, which sprawls through a great deal of the middle part of the book, always on one note: Dad running (heavy hint there, running away from problems), Mom uttering well-meant but helpless fatuities and popping pills, and most of all, Piper’s vomit-comet sister crashing through nearly every scene being selfish, violent, and a total drag. There was even a strong undercurrent of outright horror for any parent reading it..

The book follows a somewhat conventional young adult format in a kind of Hail Mary at the end after Piper’s plans are shipwrecked, and though I found it a bit hard to swallow. I did like how the circumstances tucked back into the friendship between the three.

That said, I was left wishing that this had been Kit’s or Enzo’s story so that Marli and her self-absorbed violence would have been minimized down to plot points that could be skimmed as they were so repetitive, but also because I could not believe that hip teens, even in a relatively conservative environment, were totally clueless about the B in LBTQ. I was hoping that aspect would be explored—and of course there was the art I’d hoped for, the conversations about technique, art then and now, experimentation.

I feel that if Piper had talked about her senior project all the way through, pulling in hard-won insights along the way, this would have been a much stronger book. But even with what I felt were unevennesses, there was enough energy and charm that other readers could have a great time with it.

This is one of those books that I liked from the first page, and then quickly went downhill when I realized there wasn't much more to say.

The characters were weirdly flat. Piper, for example, can be defined by her love of art and her obsession with Andy Warhol... an obsession that is confusing, as if it only exists to say "this girl loves art. Here is an example of how much" without adding any depth to her character. There are so many of these "Look! Here's what an art lover would do!" moments that don't hold any truth. This is coming from the girl who's done 14 years of studio art, has an artist for a mother and a sister in art school. Piper felt like a caricature of an art student, with the author telling us rather than showing us who she is.

I was hoping Piper started off as annoying so that she would have some kind of redeeming arc. So that she could grow as a person, discover that life was more than hating everything and everyone and loving Andy Warhol. But no. She's whiny, all the time. She even says things like "No one has ever suffered as much as me," which felt like how an adult would imagine a teenager feels and thinks.

I should have put this book down when I realized how little I cared for Piper's story, but I pushed through to see if there was this redeeming arc. Unfortunately, the plot remained predictable and Piper remained annoying. While I am sure many could and would enjoy this novel, it really was not for me. Pass.