Kylie Fornasier

Representation: Main character with selective mutism, side implied Asian character
Trigger warnings: Bullying, suicide, coma, hospitalisation
Score: Seven points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

This was sitting at my library for a while right next to If I Stay (I read that earlier but it was only okay) and I wanted to read this so I picked it up and finally read it. When I finished this novel I had a lot of thoughts inside my head that I want to show you here, well first off other than the disability rep this is your standard run-of-the-mill romance novel, it gets uniqueness points since it's Australian (I don't see that much Australian literature) but the ending... I was lost for words. It starts with the main character Piper Rhodes or Piper for short and at the beginning she was in a dream where she tore her journal up for whatever reason and then was about to jump into the water but it was all a dream. After her friend abandoned her (cliché, I know), she moves to a new school in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales where she meets this other significant character called West whose last name I don't even know (Really? Never seen a name like that.) She tells me that she has Selective Mutism or SM for short so she can speak with her family just fine but she finds it harder to speak with people at school. Now that I said that Piper develops a relationship with West since this is a romance book after all and everything looks like sunshine and rainbows until the last few pages. After a soccer accident West was hospitalised and not much time afterwards the story ended there. That was the most open ending I ever saw.
P.S. What kind of teenager uses Facebook in 2023? I get that they would use it since other platforms like Snapchat and Discord were non-existent but now the book's outdated.… (altro)

I started out rather charmed by this--perhaps unsurprisingly, since I'm a pretty easy sell for Venetian society hijinks. The characters were interesting, the setting vivid without being tortuous, and it leapt straight into plot-on-the-go. (It's also a very Australian blend of light-hearted hijinks and consequences with teeth.)

Unfortunately, I finish it rather disappointed. There was just sort of too much of it--too many POV characters (about seven all up), too much going on. The former meant we dipped too shallowly into each of the characters, and tended to spend the first half of every scene reminding ourselves who this person was and what their priorities were and what they'd been doing since last we saw them. The latter meant events felt rushed to me, especially the dumping of a whole suite of Big Happenings in the final third.

Overall, it just felt like the plot lacked the significance to carry the epic nature of its telling. This wasn't an epic story, it was seven small personal stories. Each of those stories was individually interesting, satisfying, worthy of exploration. But though intertwined, they didn't enhance each other, to my mind. More like two and a half stars, rounded up because, like I said, I'm an easy sell for Venetian society hijinks.… (altro)

Masquerade, the debut novel by Kylie Fornasier, is so beautifully presented that it was as if I had received an invitation to the Doge's box in La Fenice itself. I dove into this book at once and was immediately immersed in eighteenth century Venice, with its licentious lifestyle, gowns and frippery, masked balls and salacious gossip. The story follows the adventures of seven varied young characters in a society where the practice of secrecy and concealment plays with people's lives in as twisted a way as the canals that wind through the city. The writing was clever and witty, and I look forward to Kylie Fornasier’s next offering.
… (altro)