Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia

Title: Eliza and Her Monsters

Author: Francesca Zappia

Series Status: Standalone

# of pages: 385

My rating: 5/5 stars

 

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(From Goodreads)

Eighteen-year-old Eliza Mirk is the anonymous creator of Monstrous Sea, a wildly popular webcomic, but when a new boy at school tempts her to live a life offline, everything she’s worked for begins to crumble.

In the real world, Eliza Mirk is shy, weird, smart, and friendless. Online, Eliza is LadyConstellation, the anonymous creator of a popular webcomic called Monstrous Sea. With millions of followers and fans throughout the world, Eliza’s persona is popular. Eliza can’t imagine enjoying the real world as much as she loves her digital community. Then Wallace Warland transfers to her school, and Eliza begins to wonder if a life offline might be worthwhile. But when Eliza’s secret is accidentally shared with the world, everything she’s built—her story, her relationship with Wallace, and even her sanity—begins to fall apart. With pages from Eliza’s webcomic, as well as screenshots from Eliza’s online forums, this uniquely formatted book will appeal to fans of Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.

This book was amazing and insanely incredible. I didn’t know anything about this book but it sounded pretty cool and I ended up loving.

Starting with the characters who were so relatable. We have Eliza, who spends the majority of her life online working on a webcomic that she loves and has become good enough at that she has an income. But her life in the “real world” or anytime she isn’t online is far less interesting. She has anxiety and panic disorders, no friends at school, and a family who doesn’t really understand the internet. All of these things I found to be so relatable and it was really something that made me love the book even more. Then there’s her love interest Wallace, who’s a fanfiction writing fan of Eliza’s web comic. Along with his love of fanfiction he also has an inability to speak in front of most people. This combo of main characters is ultimately what made me fall in love with the story.

Then there is the plot which while it may have been a slower story I still read it in one sitting and fell in love with it. I feel like the true plot was focusing on Eliza realizing she has an anxiety disorder and learning how to deal with that.

I’ve never read any of Zappia’s other works but after this work I am dying to because I loved her writing style. This book is written in a weird format because it’s a combination of drawings, excerpts from webcomics, and internet messages between different characters. The way Zappia handled this made in so easy to have a flow to the story but not also lose any of the depth of growth for characters.

Overall I loved this book and found it incredibly relatable.

5/5 stars