Review: The Best Possible Answer by E. Katherine Kottaras

Title: The Best Possible Answer
Author: E. Katherine Kottaras
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publish Date: November 1, 2016
Source: Publisher

What's the Story?:

From Goodreads.com: "AP Exams – check
SAT test – check
College Application – check
Date the wrong guy and ruin everything you’ve spent your whole life working for– check

Ultra-high-achiever Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe has always had a plan—and no room to be anything less than perfect. But her quest for perfection comes to a screeching halt when her boyfriend leaks racy pictures of her to the entire school. Making matters worse, her parents are getting divorced and now her perfect family is falling apart. For the first time, Viv feels like a complete and utter failure.

Then she gets a job working at the community pool, where she meets a new group of friends who know nothing about her past. That includes Evan, a gorgeous guy who makes her want to do something she never thought she’d do again: trust. For the first time in her life, Viv realizes she can finally be whoever she wants. But who is that? While she tries to figure it out, she learns something they never covered in her AP courses: that it’s okay to be less than perfect, because it’s our imperfections that make us who we are."

My Two Cents:
 
In "The Best Possible Answer," chronic overachiever Viv is trying to continue to over-achieve while trying not to pay attention to her life as she knows it falling apart. Her dad has disappeared. She doesn't understand it but she's trying to protect her beloved sister from worrying about it as well. The guy that should be interested in her best friend is interested in Viv instead. She is stuck in a job at the local pool rather than at engineering camp, which is where she wants to be. Oh, and she is still dealing with the fallout of nude selfies of her being passed around school.

So you can see that there is a lot of stuff going on in this book. While I enjoyed the book, I think that the story definitely could have been a little streamlined. It felt like we got a little detail about all of the problems instead of a lot of information about a few problems. I found myself wanting to understand more about what was going on with specific issues and not being able to get into the book quite as much due to the lack in focus.

The issue that I found myself most interested in was the situation with Viv's family. Her dad disappears for almost a year and is supposedly working in Asia but they never hear from him. Viv's mom doesn't want to talk about what happened or when he might come back or even if he might come back. As the story unfolds, we eventually find out what's going on and it turns everything Viv thought she knew upside down. It's in this situation that we really get to see who Viv is and how she deals with vulnerability.

Overall, I liked the concept of the book and found it engaging. I wanted to know more about some of the key issues in the book but it was still a good read!