REVIEW: Invisible Girl by Mary Hanlon Stone

SYNOPSIS: When poor Boston girl Stephanie is abandoned by her abusive mother and taken in by Annie’s Beverly Hills family, she feels anything but home. Her dark complexion and accent stick out like a sore thumb in the golden-hued world of blondes and extravagance. These are girls who seem to live life in fastforward, while Stephanie is stuck on pause. Yet when a new rival moves to town, threatening Annie’s queen-bee status, Stephanie finds herself taking sides in a battle she never even knew existed, and that feeling invisible is a wound that can only be healed by standing up for who she is.

Brilliant newcomer Mary Hanlon Stone delivers a compulsively readable insider’s view of growing up in a world where money and privilege don’t always glitter.

REVIEW: I love how the story begins. It has a strong and direct impact on the readers. The reader is immediately thrown into the abused and tortured world of Stephanie and feels her emotions through her. I was immediately pulled into Stephanie’s world of chaos,loneliness and fears. I almost had goosebumps while reading the first chapter!

Mary Hanlon Stone does a great job in portraying Stephanie’s feelings and voices her thoughts in a way that made my heart go out to her.

Naturally when Stephanie is removed from her home and transported to Beverly Hills,she reacts in a certain kind of way. She wants to fit in. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a part of a ‘normal’ family,have ‘normal’ doting parents. She wants to be a part of a group of rich and popular kids. But in her efforts to achieve all this for herself,she actually messes up everything.

However,Stephanie grows in maturity and becomes more sensible at the end of the book. She learns to stand up for herself,her own thoughts,beliefs and learns to voice her opinions not considering the fact that she might be ousted from the ‘elite clique’ if she does so.

I liked this book a lot. It shows in a very poignant,sensitive way the angst of a teenager and the issue of a drinker and neglecting mother. Every teenage girl does not have a drinker mother but can surely relate to Stephanie’s problems. Her desperate attempts to fit in,inability to distinguish between reality and superficiality and inability to make decisions for herself at the beginning are some things that I think every teenager has gone through and will for the ages to come. This book had me thinking for a long time after I was done with it. Certainly a great read!

MY RATING: 4.5/5