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Anatomy of a Misfit
Anatomy of a Misfit
Anatomy of a Misfit
Audiobook6 hours

Anatomy of a Misfit

Written by Andrea Portes

Narrated by Caitlin Davies

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

“It’s rare that a book can be as funny and absolutely delightful as it is moving and thought provoking, and Anatomy of a Misfit is both.” —Lauren Oliver, author of Before I Fall

Anika Dragomir is the third-most-popular girl at Pound High School. But inside, she knows she’s a freak; she can’t stop thinking about former loner Logan McDonough, who showed up on the first day of tenth grade hotter, bolder, and more mysterious than ever.

Logan is fascinating, troubled, and off limits. The Pound High queen bee will make Anika’s life hell if she’s seen with him.

So Anika must choose—ignore her feelings and keep her social status? Or follow her heart and risk becoming a pariah. Which will she pick?

And what will she think of her choice when an unimaginable tragedy strikes, changing her forever? Part Morgan Matson, part Nicola Yoon, this incredible YA voice narrates a story Teen Vogue calls “perfection in book form.”

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperTeen
Release dateSep 2, 2014
ISBN9780062345615
Author

Andrea Portes

Andrea Portes is the bestselling novelist of two critically lauded adult novels, Hick, her debut, which was made into a feature film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Blake Lively, Eddie Redmayne, and Juliette Lewis, and Bury This. Her first novel for young adult readers, Anatomy of a Misfit, was called “perfection in book form” by Teen Vogue. Her other YA novels include The Fall of Butterflies and Liberty: The Spy Who (Kind of) Liked Me. Andrea Portes’s spooky, timeless middle grade debut is Henry & Eva and the Castle on the Cliff. Andrea grew up on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska. Later, she attended Bryn Mawr College. Currently she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Sandy Tolan, their son, Wyatt, and their dog, Rascal. You can visit her online at www.andreaportes.squarespace.com.

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Reviews for Anatomy of a Misfit

Rating: 3.3697916000000006 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

96 ratings14 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The hype around this book has been unquestionable and, admittedly, that made me eager to get my hands on it. I suggest you join NovelStar’s writing competition happening right now until the end of May. You can also publish your stories there. just email our editors hardy@novelstar.top, joye@novelstar.top, or lena@novelstar.top.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pretty humorous and little cliche. But, it had a good morale ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ANATOMY OF A MISFIT was an interesting YA debut novel. It is a story told by Anika Dragomir, third most popular girl at Pound High School. It talks about She is fifteen and the youngest of five. She lives with her mother and stepfather, she calls him the Ogre, and maintains contact with her father, she calls him Count Chocula, through phone calls which she dreads because she fears not being able to meet his high standards. The story is mainly that of her first romances and deals with the high school need to conform to the group and high school bullies, too. She is fascinated with former loner Logan McDonough but the most popular girl at Pound High School - Becky - has made him off-limits. Anika has to choose between Logan or Becky and Becky has the power to ruin her whole time in high school. She decides to sneak around with Logan and the two have a sweet romance.However, it wouldn't be a teen novel without a love triangle. The other boy who is interested in Anika is THE Jared Kline. Recent graduate and the one that everyone wants to date or be best friends with, Jared takes a liking to her and asks her mother to date her. It is Anika's first official date. This was a little problematical for me because, at most, she is a sophomore and he has graduated. Worse of all, Becky is dating Jared's younger brother and would very much like to date Jared too. The style of this book was rather hard for me to get into. It is told in tight first person from Anika's quirky point of view. It is almost stream of consciousness but, mercifully, with punctuation. We see all the characters and all the events through Anika's eyes. And Anika is sort of a drama queen. I didn't like Anika very much through most of the first two-thirds of the book.I'm glad I stuck with this one because the ending redeemed both the book and Anika for me. Teen readers will enjoy the look at high school and will likely recognize some of the characters and situations.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    2,5 stars, it was a bit long and dragged out. Nothing really happened even though it had great potentials.
    I would recommend for 15 year olds ?
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I honestly don't think I would recommend this to teens. Yes it is YA. Yes it ends with a change in character, a redemption of sorts. Yes, it is set in the 80s and things were different then. Yes, not every main character should be without flaws. BUT even though this book had a lot of things that are not necessarily bad for a book to have I just didn't like how it all played out. I didn't like the writing. I didn't like the book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I got this book through Overdrive's Big Library Read. This program allows readers across the globe to check out the same book (ebook or audio version) all at the same time. The book is available to every reader that wants it for two weeks. I love this concept. I teach teenagers, so I read a lot of YA. However, it's hard to enjoy a book when you don't like the main character. Anika is a thief and drugs her boss (without his knowledge), yet the she feels bad that people are prejudice towards outcasts and blacks. I found that the author used the same phrases over and over and I wanted her to pull out a thesaurus and find a new way to say things. The only reason I gave the book 2 stars instead of one is the ending. Finally Anika stood up for something and spoke her mind. My heart goes out to the family that lost their son, and I do admire the author for getting his story out there.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Powered through til the end, despite overt stereotyping, racism, slut-shaming, religion-bashing, serious plot & character contradictions, and repetitive writing, just hoping the writer wo the uld figure it out and finally get Anika on track. Not worth it. This could be - could really be - like, a long..., like really long, review about all the issues and writing... writing... writing (seriously, I think the author must have had a word count quota to meet, especially there towards the end), but I don't want to waste any more time on this book than I already have.

    Basically, despite the 3.5 star review average, it's really just a hypocritical hate book disguised and marketed as a self-growth YA novel. (The message can't work because of all the extreme stereotyping contradicting that goal.) Skip this one.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I only finished this because someone recommended it to me, and I kept thinking it would get better. I did not like anything about this book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Anika Dragomir feels like an outsider in her white-bread high school, despite the fact that she is the third most popular girl in school. Her angst is exacerbated when nerd-turned-hottie Logan McDonough starts giving her rides home from school. Anika kind of likes Logan -- okay, really likes Logan -- but she know that she would get endless flack from Becky, the top most popular girl, if she were to date outsider Logan. Anika's romantic troubles are further complicated when THE Jared Kline, possibly the most popular guy in town, or maybe the state, starts showing an interest in her. Sure, it's flattering, but is he just a scam artist who will use her and drop her as soon as he gets bored? And what about Logan and their sweet, secret romance?I read this for my book club, and I foresee some interesting discussion ensuing. Anika's narrative voice was, to me, really annoying. I had a hard time liking her, or even relating to her. Despite the title, I didn't see her as a misfit -- in fact, I began to wonder if the title was supposed to refer to her, or to Logan (who probably qualifies as a misfit, but we don't get nearly as much insight into his character as we do into hers). Anika is a pretty, popular girl from a middle-class family. She has 99 problems, and all of them are first-world problems, mostly caused by her own bad choices. Okay, so she's a teenager, I can usually look past that in a YA book. But the writing was not as tight as I would like it to be. For one thing, the book is interspersed with short chapters, set apart by being typeset in italics, that are foreshadowing of the book's final events -- the character is pedaling on a bike, heading toward some cataclysmic event. I'd have been fine with one chapter like that at the beginning, or conversely I'd have been fine if each successive foreshadowing chapter revealed more key details, but they really didn't reveal anything new or add anything to the story. Also, as we might surmise, Anika is the one riding the bike in the foreshadowing chapters, but it's never mentioned in the earlier parts of the story that she even has a bike. Instead, we get her whining about her long walk home from school. Hmm, I see a solution here... One more criticism: I feel like it's just a little bit lazy when authors from my generation write YA novels and set them in the high school of the '80s or '90s, especially when there's not a strong reason within the plot for the book to be set in the present day. Granted, in this case the author mentions that the book is partially based on her own high-school experience, but seeing as it is fiction and not memoir, perhaps the pop culture references and such could have been updated a bit. I can't find a plot-based reason why the characters are name-checking Madonna and Bruce Willis instead of Lady Gaga and Orlando Bloom, or whoever kids these days name-check. Maybe I am being too picky, because the book did grab me once I got past being irritated at the narrative voice and settled into the story. I think this will appeal to fans of YA realistic fiction along the lines of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but it wasn't really my cup of tea.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The end was definitely a surprise for me. Everything escalated so quickly and ended without readers getting to truly deal with the consequences of what they read. Up until the end, only first world problems and teenage angst were the focus of this book, but the last thirty or so pages flipped that around. There were many emotional moments, in which I would laugh or cry or even feel angered, but I could not find it in myself to put down this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    ANATOMY OF A MISFIT is like the perfect blend of the movie Heathers and Mean Girls if John Hughes had directed them. I don't normally comment on dedications and acknowledgments in book reviews, but they ended up weighing heavily on my mind as I finished this book. The dedication reads: "For Dylan. This is a novel based on my ninth-grade year of junior high. I wrote this story because I wish I could go back in time and give this message to myself." Here's the thing, the dedication made me read this book on a personal level, calling up my own regrets from high school and rooting all the more for Anika when she found ways to do what the author didn't (what I didn't). And the acknowledgment at the very end (which I won't share because it's kind of spoiler-y) made me cry because there is a reality behind this fictional story that broke my heart to pieces. So emotional gut punches. Yep, there are plenty. But this book also made me laugh out loud, then cringe, then want to throttle people for being so evil and shake the bystanders for standing by and doing nothing, then laugh out loud again. This is not a simple book, but it is wildly entertaining and equally thought provoking. I guarantee you that there will be parts of this book that offend you (probably more than a few). There will be parts that maybe outrage you from a moral standpoint (whatever that may be). There will be other parts that make you cheer and make you cry, and make you want this book to go on and on and simultaneously end so you can finally breath again. And the voice of Ankia! Oh the voice! This whole book is like the most intimate of intimate conversations with your best friend. It feels secretive and shocking and conspiratorial and the entire time it's like Anika is talking directly to you:"My boss doesn’t know I’ve been poisoning him.Don’t be jealous but Shelli and I got a job at the Bunza Hut. We get to wear lemon-colored fake polos, Kelly-green shorts, and banana LA Gear sneakers. We get to wear this every. Shift."Seriously. Just stop reading this review and read this book. Go. Right now.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Anika is the third most popular girl in high school, a position she doesn't hold lightly being the strangely-named daughter of a Romanian professor. When two boys compete for her affections, she has to decide how much she cares about the opinions of everyone else, particularly her "friend" Becky, the girl whom everyone hates but whose opinion matters when it comes to who's popular and who's a reject.This book was the e-book and audiobook chosen for the "Big Library Read," a two-week period in which Overdrive copies are available for any library user to check out simultaneously. It bills itself as a cross between Mean Girls and [The Perks of Being the Wallflower], and that seems to me a fairly apt description. Anika realistically struggles with her fears of what would happen if she chooses Logan, the former social pariah who now has a moped and creatively reaches out to Anika; and Jared, the popular guy whose reputation is as a player, but Anika isn't so sure. In addition, she has a complicated family life and an after-school job with a nutty boss. She also doesn't have a great opinion of herself, saying everyone thinks she's nice but inside she's "spider soup." I could see this appealing to the same crowd that likes Perks, though it's not particularly my cup of tea.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very annoying.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story is good enough and the writing is good enough and the characters are good enough but, overall, there were a few hiccups that I couldn't get past. The language/slang was borderline annoying but the story helped gloss over that.