Book Review: 'Eliza and Her Monsters' by Francesca Zappia

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappa is the story of 18 year old, loner high school student Eliza Mirk. By day Eliza is known to her school as the weird kid that keeps to herself and has no friends but by night Eliza is LadyConstellation, creator of the extremely popular web series, Monstrous Sea. Eliza keeps her two worlds separate, the only people that know of her secret identity are her family and her two online best friends that help her run her website. When Eliza is given the task of showing around the new kid her world becomes increasingly more complicated as she discovers that he is a Monstrous Sea fan.

I'll try not to give too many spoilers as I know a lot of people would rather read the book and be surprised. I found this book to be a great read. It does deal with some heavy topics at times such as depression, bullying, social anxiety and suicide but I found it to be tastefully done.

The book is narrated by Eliza, though she doesn't talk much to her family or while at school her inner monologue runs rampant with her outlooks, good and bad, on her life.

I feel like this book will connect perfectly with a young adult audience as so much of life is now online and this book sums it up perfectly. Eliza's two best friends and people she met on a forum online. She communicates with them through texting, emails and their online forum. Eliza's parents are often frustrated with her for always being online and told her to join the real world. They didn't consider her friends to be real friends since they only talk online but to Eliza this was the only place she could go where people would understand her, where she could express herself through her art. Sure being LadyConstellation hid her true identity, but it also gave Eliza the chance to express herself more freely without being afraid.

Eliza almost seems like an outcast inside of her own family. Her entire family is made up of athletes. Everyone except for Eliza. Apparently she used to make attempts at joining sports teams to make her parents happy but she stopped doing that before the point of narration of the book. I would like to think that she stopped because she realized that she wasn’t being true to herself and who she really is but it never really explains it other than saying she’s terrible at sports.

Naturally her identity is eventually found out. This panics Eliza, as she doesn't know how people will react. Being worried about how people will react send Eliza into a depression that is fueled by her anxiety. I think that a lot of people will be able to identify with this. Of course not everyone has secret identities but to an extent there is that private part of ourselves that we keep from everyone except for those we completely trust.

The book is spotted throughout with the characters communicating through texts, emails, hand written notes and the online forum. I found these fun to read and often revealed more about the characters than just the regular narrating would. Also through out the book there is some of the story from the webcomic as well as art. It was very entertaining and I found it fun to see some of Eliza's work rather than just hear about it. There are also some excerpts from fan fiction written about Monstorus Sea which are also quite entertaining.

Eliza and Her Monsters was a easy and quick read. Something about the story and the characters were spell binding and made it very hard to put down the book. I think a lot of people will be able to relate to being an outcast. After all we all feel like an outcast at some point.

All in all I give this book 4 out of 5 stars.