Grade: 5
From debut author, Margot Wood, comes Fresh: A hilarious and vulnerable coming-of-age story about the thrilling new experience–and missteps–of a girl’s freshman year of college.
While this is Wood’s first published novel, this is not her first experience in publishing. Which I think shows itself in the quality of writing. Typically I find that a first book has areas where the author needs some forgiveness or leeway. I was very pleasantly surprised that I didn’t find any of those areas in Fresh.
We meet Elliot at her first day moving into her new dorm room. Although struggling with homesickness she quickly connects with her roommate and several other students in her dorm. While also butting heads with her RA, Rose.
Elliot looks at college as a way to spread her wings and explore…and also to put off having to make any decisions, like what her major will be. She convinces herself that she can use sexual exploration as the basis for one of her major papers of the semester. At the end of the semester, she hasn’t found what she was looking for in her sexual encounters, all of her friendships are on the rocks and her grades are barely passing. Since she thought she was killing her first semester of college, she has to take a good hard look at her self and her actions.
The book is written from first person POV. With footnotes. It’s basically like the character is talking to you, her friend. With little side tangents that are footnotes. The footnotes, for me, were as if I was talking to a friend who is saying something that I know is a lie and they know they is a lie… so they fess up after I gave them a side-eye. Needless to say, the writing style alone made the book an interesting read.
The characters where 100% relatable. All of them where exactly as fleshed out as they needed to be. The ones that just came on to the page to further the story, but didn’t really need to be involved, where written to exactly that depth. The ones that were going to mean something in the story had a good solid amount of backstory written in.
My final note of the book. About halfway through, I was angry. As in, wondering if I was going to like the book because of things that were happening. Little did I know the author was doing that on purpose. Because at this point, I was basically seeing the world completely through the eyes of the main character, who at halfway point was angry and upset at the world for not doing what she wanted it to do.
So what I have to say to Ms. Wood is Brava. GREAT first book! Looking forward to seeing what you come out with next!
Bottomline: You will not be bored.
Lori Carroll
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