Paper Girl by Cindy R. Wilson

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Title: Paper Girl
Author: Cindy R. Wilson
Published by: Entangled: Teen
Release Date: December 4, 2018
Format: eARC
Pages: 400
Genres: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Source: NetGalley
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2018 Netgalley and Edelweiss Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 New Release Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER Winter 2018
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks ✩ IndieBound
My rating:

Blurb:

I haven’t left my house in over a year. My doctor says it’s social anxiety, but I know the only things that are safe are made of paper. My room is paper. My world is paper. Everything outside is fire. All it would take is one spark for me to burst into flames. So I stay inside. Where nothing can touch me.

Then my mom hires a tutor. Jackson. This boy I had a crush on before the world became too terrifying to live in. Jackson’s life is the complete opposite of mine, and I can tell he’s got secrets of his own. But he makes me feel things. Makes me want to try again. Makes me want to be brave. I can almost taste the outside world. But so many things could go wrong, and all it takes is one spark for everything I love to disappear…

My Review:

I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest and unbiased review/opinion.

3.5 stars — This one left me with muddled thoughts and feelings, so rating it is a bit hard for me.  I’m finding it hard to articulate how I feel, but I’m going to try…this is just your warning.  Basically, I enjoyed myself, but I also wasn’t blown away.  I think I expected the mental health aspects to play a stronger role, but the romance, strangely enough, was the highlight for me.

So yeah.  The thing about Zoe, and her anxiety (or agoraphobia?) is that we never really get a clear idea of what she’s suffering from.  Which is not to say we don’t get any idea…there’s actually some really great descriptions of what she’s going through, how her panic attacks get triggered, what she’s afraid of.  (And as an aside, can I just say that I appreciated that it wasn’t as a result of some great trauma, because I don’t think everyone who suffers from anxiety necessarily has a triggering event.)  And we also see her new therapist talking about cognitive behavioral therapy a bit (like when she said they needed to help retrain her thinking), but other than that, there wasn’t a lot of depth there.  Like, we never learn about her coping mechanisms, or any other steps she’s taking to help deal.  I felt like we got just enough to have it be an integral part of Zoe, but not enough for me to feel like it could be influential for teens.  I honestly can’t speak for whether this depiction, and the consequential development/healing journey was realistic or not.  Honestly, it truly felt like we were working on a fictional timeline (ie things moved fairly quickly), and that can give unrealistic expectations to readers who might be suffering from the same thing.  But honestly, I’m no expert…it’s just how I felt when I was finished.  I guess I just wasn’t sure what I was going to get with the mental health side of this story, and I felt that in the end the way it was addressed was rather light.  It was there, we saw aspects, but in some ways it was overshadowed by the romance for me.  Now, I loved the romance, it was a total highlight for me, so woop woop for that, it’s just that I was surprised.  Now saying all that, I appreciated that Zoe wasn’t magically healed by love, and understood that she needed to make the changes for her.  So that was a bonus.

Jackson was an interesting character, because unlike Zoe who wanted to get better but was just afraid, he seemed to be oblivious to his own issues and what he needed to do to fix them.  I found that to be a fascinating twist, that he was just as screwed up as Zoe.  And I felt like he still didn’t really confront all that was messed up about his choices to keep his homelessness a secret.  I didn’t really get a nice resolution with his Dad…it was just sort of okay all of a sudden.  I felt like I needed something more there.  Like, did Jackson even learn anything in the end?

Their romance was totally sweet though.  I loved the way they moved from crushing to flirting to more…it was a believable transition, and I got a lot of sweet butterflies from it.  Obviously I grew frustrated with both of them for wanting to help the other but not wanting to accept help themselves.  And I was frustrated with Jackson for not respecting Zoe’s need to do things on her own…and I felt like I wasn’t sure Jackson ever understood why she needed that.  So there were ups and downs in their relationship as well, but on the whole I just loved them.  I even loved their friendship on Chess Challenge.

I appreciated that Zoe’s family played a role in the story, though I did feel like Zoe’s Mom was a bit of an enabler and might have needed her own help.  Mae was pretty cool, and I appreciated that she behaved very much like a teenager, where you could feel her heart and her hurts, but sometimes she reacted a bit over the top.  It was believable.

I also appreciated what little we saw of Zoe’s new therapist, Gina.  While I did want more there, I enjoyed what we saw.

Another little thing that was a highlight for me was the paper art depicted in the story.  What I wouldn’t give to have seen Zoe’s Galaxy.

So yeah.  A bit of a mixed bag.  Like I said, I really enjoyed myself…I think I just wanted more, but I’m having a hard time describing what that more is.  Ah well.