Blog Tour: By the Book by Amanda Sellet | Review + Playlist + Dream Cast

Ahhhh yesterday was a nice little break from blogging and stuff. Although it definitely wasn’t a break everywhere else! I felt really busy and yet really off for my mood, but I’m here today! I’m also super busy today for some reason even though it’s a Saturday and I’m not back in an office yet, but that’s how it is I guess.

Thank you so much to the team at Fantastic Flying Book Club for having me on this tour and for hosting yet another fun blog tour! Click on the banner for the rest of the tour schedule.

By the Book

by Amanda Sellet
Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers
Release Date: May 12, 2020
Genre: YA Contemporary Romance

Mary Porter-Malcolm has prepared for high school in the one way she knows how: an extensive review of classic literature to help navigate the friendships, romantic liaisons, and overall drama she has come to expect from such an “esteemed” institution. Her love of literature even inspires her to imagine herself the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. Not the sort who makes poor life choices and ends up dying of consumption while still in her teens, but the noble, virtuous, quick-witted type.

When some new friends seem in danger of falling for the same tricks employed since the days of Austen and Tolstoy, Mary swoops in to create the Scoundrel Survival Guide, using archetypes of literature’s debonair bad boys to signal red flags. But despite her best efforts, she soon finds herself unable to listen to her own good advice and falling for a supposed cad—the same one she warned her friends away from. Without a convenient rain-swept moor to flee to, Mary is forced to admit that real life doesn’t follow the same rules as fiction and that if she wants a happy ending, she’s going to have to write it herself.

Debut author Amanda Sellet had a previous career in journalism, during which she wrote book reviews for The Washington Post, personal essays for NPR, and music and movie coverage for VH1. These days she lives in Kansas with her archaeologist husband and their daughter.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Fantastic Flying Book Club, Netgalley, and HMH Books for Young Readers for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

So…. yeah I totally dug this one! I love books where the main character is a huge bookworm and then somehow brings what they learn from their books into the “real world”. Here’s another main character that I fell in love with and found super quirky for some reason. Well, I mean the reason I fell in love with our main character Mary was because I was so into her literature prowess and how she ended up taking all these bad boy tropes from our favorite books in the world to make this Scoundrel Survival Guide for her fellow women in high school. If I had her guide even right now, who knows? I may have been able to avoid some of these less than seemly characters in my life. But alas, fact is stranger than fiction.

I also love that no matter what kind of preparation Mary had from all the books she read, it still didn’t help her when it came to “IRL”. There’s always that one person that will just… do things to you even when you know you are supposed to resist that type at all costs. It just happens sometimes, and this is what happened here.

I may not be a classic novel stan, but I also appreciate my literary girls going back to the classics to judge what makes a good romantic partner or not. Sometimes you just have to go to the past and figure out if our definition of good partners has changed or not. Who knows? But sometimes you can compare what you read in a classic novel to what you read now and see that some of the tropes haven’t changed very much, some of the characters haven’t changed very much except the time period. That’s a pretty broad statement but could also be considered true.