Forever Obsession: To Be Perfectly Honest

Title: To Be Perfectly Honest: A Novel Based on an Untrue Story by Sonya Sones

ISBN: 978-0-689-87604-2
Pages: 480
Appearance:

Summary:

My name is Colette.

This book is about me.

Who am I?

To be perfectly honest,

I'm not exactly sure who I am

I guess you could say

I'm the fifteen-year-old daughter

of an annoyingly famous movie star.

Or maybe

I'm the eighteen-year-old daughter

of a famous movie star's stand-in.

Or maybe

I'm the thousand-year old daughter

of a vampire...

Having trouble guessing

which one of these stories is true?

Join the club.

My friends have a joke about me:

How can you tell if Colette is lying?

Her mouth is open.

As you can probably tell, this book is written in verse, so don't let the page numbers scare you off because I find that books in verse are usually better. Maybe it's because it reminds me of music and how the story line has a rhythm of its own, much more realistic than journaling everything in chapters because since when does life happen the way it's supposed to, falling right into its place; maybe that's why I like poems so much...but that's just my opinion, tell me yours in the comments below :)

So the book...I was so confused at the beginning because Colette would always be stringing out these lies, not because she was purposely trying to, but it was a just a part of her personality. It was who she was, you could either love it or hate it. But in the beginning it was so hard to understand where she was coming from because you will begin to think, "Oh, she's just a liar, no good kind of person." But then you keep reading and you get sucked into her life and why she is how she is. It's not that she wants to lie, but it just bubbles up inside her and then she has to. I actually liked how she was unreliable because it became a puzzle trying to figure out, "oh is that lie?" and this made it more exciting because you were always anticipating the lie.

Now why does Colette lie...think about it, if you were the son/daughter of a famous person, how many times do you think you would be compared to them? So what would you do? Some would just hide away and pretend they were invisible next to their parents, some would always strive to follow in their parent's footsteps becoming perfectionists, and still some would become who their parents are not, just to spite them.

The latter is what Colette became. She has so many piercings on her ears that they jingle when she walks, not because she felt empowered to do so, but because she knows they annoy her mother. She changes the colors her eyes using colored contacts because she wants to build a wall around her, so she pretends to not care. This wall of protection is shown physically through her outer appearance. Her entire life is built around this confusion, she doesn't even know who her father is. She knows she can never live up to her mother's movie-star quality so she doesn't even try.

Or maybe not live up because her mom isn't too great person either but she tries. So when her mom has to go to a location shoot for a movie for the summer, guess who has to go with? Colette and her brother Will with his super cute lisping. And because they have no choice, Colette has to skip a trip to France that she had planned with her friends since forever. Not only that, but she will have to take care of her brother while her mom is at the location shoot, working during the day. This reveals her personality. She has a good heart, and means well, but she's confused and young and naive.

But the good thing is on the trip, she meets a guy...on a motorcycle...with tiger-striped hair...named Connor, and you know how those stories always turn out. She lies about her age, falls in "love", and he takes advantage of her.

I love how at the end she has a change of heart and actually tries to be truthful and honest because someone else isn't, she wants to better than that person. She no longer wants to stoop to their level. She doesn't want anyone else to have to uncover her lies, like she did about Connor, and have to feel the betrayal that she did.