This Is How It Happened by Paula Stokes | Book Review

Summary

YouTube Sensation and singer Dallas Kade and his girlfriend, Genevieve Grace get involved in a car accident after they leave an album release party. Brad Freeman, was the truck driver that hit them. Dallas dies dead on arrival. Genevieve wakes up in the hospital alone and tries to piece together what happened.

Writing

The writing is average, nothing special going on.

Characters

Genevieve Grace: Genevieve apparently is an "introvert" and doesn't like going to parties.

Quote: “Not to mention I’m kind of introverted, so I usually killed time in some quiet corner, texting my best friend, Shannon, or pretending to be responding to urgent emails while everyone else danced and mingled. When I was lucky enough that the parties were at private residences, I sometimes ended up on the floor somewhere playing with a dog or cat, or once a frisky pair of ferrets.”

Genevieve I found to be an average YA protagonist. Nothing really interesting about her. I found her annoying at times.

Dallas Kade: We don't get to spend much time with Dallas before he dies in the first couple of chapters. Dallas is a "huge" YouTuber with thousands of followers and he just released his first single called "Younity" with rapper Tyrell James. And that's all you really get to know about him.

Elena Grace: Annoying YA mother.

Shannon: Typical YA best friend. Nothing special about her.

Elliot: Genevieve meets Elliot after deciding to go to Utah for the summer. Again, another typical YA character. Muscular, good looking. He wants to become a vet and he has gay dads. That's all you really know about him, he has no personality. He's a Manic Pixie Dream Guy.

Likes

• The realistic thing I like about this book was how everyone tried to empathize with Genevieve about Dallas' death. I feel like this happens in real life with celebrity deaths. If a well known celebrity dies, people try to pretend that they were a fan of that celebrity since the beginning or they've been a fan forever when really they probably just found out about who that person was when they died.

Dislikes

• I disliked the social media aspect.
• I disliked how we were made to believe that Dallas is this HUGE YouTube personality and EVERYONE loves him. And his album is SO GOOD and it's selling really great. I dislike books that involve that kind of fame. Tash Hearts Tolstoy by Kathryn Ormsbree does this really well. This book...not so much.
• I honestly think if this happened in real life, I don't think this amount of coverage would be realistic.
• Similar plot to With Malice by Eileen Cook.
• How the characters depended on social media. Example: Shannon thought Genevieve was crazy for thinking about deleting her Twitter. Quote; “Seriously?” Shannon asks. “But . . . what will you do? I mean, how will you talk to people?”
“Shan, you’re one of the only people I want to talk to, and you’ll still be my friend if I don’t like all your Instagrams and YouTube vids, right?”
“Of course. I just . . . I can’t imagine giving up social media. Aren’t you going to be bored?” There's a thing that you can do called talking face to face. I've lived without being on Facebook/Instagram, I don't have a Twitter, for a year. I think I turned out all right.
• Later on in the book, Genevieve goes to stay and visit her dad in Utah and Genevieve's stepmother, Rachael, runs a national park. The national park is known for having trails and hikes that are dangerous. So dangerous people have died on the trails. If people have died on the trails...why is the park still open? Wouldn't somebody shut that down already?
• Genevieve became really annoying near the end of the book
• I feel like the National Park storyline was unnecessary. It added nothing to the plot of the book.
• If I was Genevieve, I would not be checking online, reading articles, seeing what people are talking about on the situation. She was constantly reading "tweets" "articles" like WHY IS SHE DOING THAT?
• I don't think people would vandalize, throw bricks and riot just because a YouTuber died...
• Don't really like Elliot. I feel like the author wrote him just so we can "crush" on him. There is nothing crush-worthy about him at all.
• It took Genevieve the entire fucking book to confess on what happened. After what Brad Freeman attempts to do, she's like, "Oh maybe now would be a great time to admit what happened."

Overall

I wanted to DNF this so bad but I powered through this. I didn't like Genevieve at all, she was so annoying and unlikable. I really didn't like anyone in the entire book. Everyone was terribly written. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

Rating

⭐️ / 5