17 year old Rilla goes to live with her sister and connects with a group of climbers in Yosemite National Park.
Sarah Nicole Lemon is a talented writer and she writes about lower income families in an honest and authentic way. Done Dirt Cheap, her debut, is a fantastic novel but unfortunately I did not enjoy Valley Girls. The character's arc was all over the place, the voice didn't engage me and the plot dragged from the beginning for me. That is not to say that other readers won't enjoy this book. Although there are weaknesses, it is not a badly written novel, it simply wasn't to my taste.

I loved loved loved Sarah Nicole Lemon’s debut Done Dirt Cheap, which I picked up on a whim, knowing not much about but loving the girl power vibe of the cover and unorthodox name. I loved her ability to write resilient, strong female characters and went into her sophomore novel, Valley Girls, with similar expectations. What I encountered was a story that was much, much different than her debut, and that unfortunately failed to compel me the way Done Dirt Cheap did. While Valley Girls has a stunning setting and is no doubt a book that was dearly and thoroughly researched, it unfortunately missed the mark for me.

Valley Girls focuses on Rilla, who’s been sent to live with her sister, a summer park ranger of sorts, in Yosemite Valley. She’s left behind a troubled and tainted past in West Virginia and this summer in Yosemite is a bit of a last chance situation for her. Rilla unfortunately was the main issue for me in this book. As the protagonist, readers spend all of their time in her head, and she’s quite frankly irritating and self absorbed and honestly doesn’t start showing much growth until the very end of the book. She constantly and consistently makes poor decisions and holds herself back with them, and is insecure beyond belief. Now I know insecurities are a huge part of the teenage experience, but she would lament over the tiniest of mistakes she’d made in social situations for pages upon pages, which was such a change from Lemon’s previous protagonists. While the novel is obviously focused on the tale of her growth, I wish I could have seen more progress than I did.

While an unlikable protagonist doesn’t completely make or break a novel (sometimes the best novels can have the worst protagonists), I failed to connect with Rilla at all, as I feel I never really got a clear vision of her backstory. There’s a lot of really heavy, formative experiences and issues that are hinted at (parents who are polyamorous and in and out of jail, excessive partying, domestic abuse, etc.) which are huge themes but only ever get mentioned in passing. I really wish I had a chance to get to know exactly WHAT happened to get Rilla sent to Yosemite, as then I feel like I could have connected more with her on her journey (I know this is obviously a tale of the protagonist leaving her past behind but I felt let down by the mention of these huge issues that were never addressed fully).

The other element that had me struggling through the book was the rock climbing. Now, this is completely just my personal taste, but I am not an athletic minded person at all, so as soon as a book starts getting too technical for me I tend to get bored. I found this book was super technical and descriptive about the rock climbing process (which is a great thing if you’re interested in it! It’s evident a lot of care and research went into writing those scenes and I definitely know way more about rock climbing than I ever thought I would- including some of the wild stuff like how climbers literally sleep suspended in midair off of a mountain on a port-a-ledge). However, I did find myself eventually skimming many of the climbing portions.

While many of the main focuses of the book didn’t work for me, there were a lot of secondary elements that I liked that I wish had been featured more. I really liked Rilla’s sister, Thea, who had completely turned her life around from her West Virginia upbringing. There were a ton of female rock climber characters who all had their strengths and flaws but who were all incredibly independent, from Caroline, a sponsored, Instagram famous climber to Adeena, a climber from Pakistan who scaled Everest when she was even younger than Rilla, and who used climbing as a way to help finance her education. I wish I had gotten to know these women’s backstories even better as well, and I wish their presence had been more motivating to Rilla rather than discouraging.

Overall: Valley Girls is an book that’s obviously written with incredible research and care regarding rock climbing, and has a very vivid portrayal of life in Yosemite Valley. However, Rilla’s behavior and lack of growth coupled with my disinterest in the technical rock climbing scenes made this one a miss for me.

As a climber myself (though I'm a not very good indoor boulderer, rather than an unexpectedly prodigal big wall climber), how could I not want to read Valley Girls - troubled teen gets sent to Yosemite and starts to climb - and happily, it did not disappoint.

Rilla's story is not uncommon in the world of contemporary YA - troubled teen is sent to live with a family member after getting into trouble at home - but the setting of this book, in the heart of Yosemite, sets it apart from those others. Even without the climbing, Yosemite is a world away from the small town where Rilla has grown up. Rilla's initially resistant to what Yosemite has to offer, but as she starts to meet people, and reconnect with her older sister, she opens up to new possibilities, and can start to heal from the hurt in her past.

The background to exactly what happened to Rilla back home is teased out over the course of the book. Lemon does a great job of including enough information that the reader can start to see what's going on, even while Rilla is still maintaining to everyone, including herself, that she's entirely at fault for what's happened in her past. This element of the story feels incredibly realistic, particularly as girls and women are told by society that they're responsible for how others, particularly men and boys, react to them and treat them. Rilla needs time with a different group of people to start to unlearn those damaging lessons and find her own self-worth. There's also some polyamory representation which added an expected depth to the story for me.

The climbing elements of the story were, I thought, really well rendered. Yosemite is the home of big wall climbing, and Rilla's thrown right into the middle of that. She's climbed a little herself back home, but what she's faced with here is very different, and there's a very different crowd for her to spend time with. I think Lemon did a great job with the climbing crew in Yosemite. They're all distinct characters with their own relationships to each other, and seeing Rilla struggle to find her way into the group is both uncomfortable and realistic.

My one issue with the climbing is that some of the technical elements might be difficult to understand if you don't know much about the sport. Although Lemon does explain the tools and techniques as the book progresses, as Rilla learns about them herself, once the big climax of the story starts to build, those explanations fall by the wayside a little. However, I do appreciate that once that climactic element starts, the descriptions are rich and wonderful, and I can see that too much exposition might well have slowed that down. I would also recommend checking out some YouTube videos of Lynn Hill (probably the most well-known female big wall climber in Yosemite's history), or checking out Valley Uprising (which certainly used to be on Netflix here in the UK), which chronicles the history of big wall climbing in Yosemite.

Valley Girls is a really interesting take on a familiar YA trope, with the brilliant addition of big wall climbing. Rilla's a realistic and appealing main character with a painful backstory, and the opportunity to make huge changes to her life. I would recommend it to anyone who's interested in a YA novel with an unusual setting, and a window onto a sport, a lifestyle, that needs you to face your fears.

Honestly, Valley Girls wasn’t egregious or offensive or really even that bad, but I was so utterly bored and indifferent I couldn’t wait for it to be over. My biggest problem was likely my complete annoyance at main character, Rilla, who was forced to leave her home in West Virginia after some relationship problems and live with her park ranger sister in Yosemite valley.

I didn’t really like Rilla at all. I’m honestly not entirely clear on why she’s in Yosemite to begin with, but we do not mesh. She is very needy and insecure. Obviously, the climbing journey is going to showcase her growth, but I felt like she didn’t get into it for herself she just wanted to impress/belong with the older “cooler” people she just met. I also found a few scenes in the beginning to be a little confusing. There were a lot of new characters to keep track of in a wild environment and I did get lost a time or two.

But I did really all the climbing stuff!!!! There’s a great group of people and lots of comrodiere, but I just didn’t get enough from the story overall the make me want to continue.

On the basis of Done Dirt Cheap, I kind of expected more of this book. That's not to say it wasn't good, or that my current fantasy/historical kick isn't behind why I didn't enjoy it as much, but it definitely contributed.

Valley Girls tells the story of Rilla Skidmore, who's sent by her mother to live with her half-sister Thea in Yosemite, after a big fight with her boyfriend. There, she falls in with a group of climbers, including Walker, the apparently gorgeous (seriously, every time Walker's name gets mentioned, you get a sentence, minimum, about how gorgeous he is) Search and Rescue worker. Most of the story revolves around the fact that Rilla wants to reinvent herself to all these new people she's met, and plans on doing so through climbing, specifically through climbing El Capitan, a 3000ft vertical rock formation.

One of my favourite things about Sarah Nicole Lemon's debut was the friendship between the two girls. While this book did have some great girl friendships, it never quite reached the level that Done Dirt Cheap did. And while the sibling conflict occasionally verged on coming to a head and being fully resolved, it never entirely managed it. Instead, it felt somewhat sidelined compared to the romance particularly, and was one of two plotpoints that seemed like it was left hanging. Similarly, there was conflict between Thea and another Ranger in competition for the same job that appeared to also go unresolved.

In contrast, Sarah Nicole Lemon's romances are one of my least favourite things about her books. They're well-written and for the most part well-developed, but they're always between an 18 or so aged girl (17 to start off with in this book) and a 20 something year old boy (20 in this book, so I'll grant you it's better than the 18 and 28 I dealt with in her other book). I mean, what's authors' problems with romances between people of the same age, especially when one of them isn't even legally an adult yet? It just makes me uncomfortable, no matter how much I like how the characters are individually written, and however well the romance is written, because the fact still remains the relationship is imbalanced. At least in this book they didn't stay together.

I think most of what made me not like this so much was the fact that all I want to read right now is fantasy or historical books, so I almost had to force myself through this one. It was one of those where once I got into it it was fine, but finding the motivation to pick it up and get into it was another matter.

Seventeen-year-old Rilla is a party queen, driven from her home in West Virginia to her park ranger sister’s place in Yosemite National Park. Determined to forge a new identity she can be proud of, Rilla charms her way into a tight-knit group of climbers. Talking to them, Rilla can’t help but be seduced by the unique opportunities she’s been granted. Not wishing to squander them, she sets her sights on climbing El Capitan, one of the most challenging routes in Yosemite, and her summer becomes one harrowing and ecstatic experience after another: first climb, first fall two thousand feet in the air, first love. Rilla starts to get closer and closer to the person she wants to become, but with her family and future at odds, what will she choose?

For a while, I wasn’t sure what to make of this book. Sipping my lemongrass and ginger tea, I scanned the synopsis, wondering if it was the kind of contemporary book I’d fall in love with, or one I’d regret picking up. Contemporary books are a bit of an odd one for me, I can be awfully picky with them.

My general overview of Valley Girls is that it was okay. Readable, definitely. The idea of having a book centred around a hobby such as rock climbing really interested me, and I’m pleased there was lots of terminology in there to pick up along the way. [Note, there’s a helpful glossary at the back of the book if you’re like me and you wish to spend your life with feet planted firmly on the ground.] The whole plot around the climbing was great, and those were the moments that the book really took off for me. Lemon doesn’t hold back on pointing out the dangers of climbing, and the book urges readers to be careful by showing some of the tense situations Rilla and her friends wind up in, but most of all Valley Girls shows the beauty of nature, the possibility of doing something you never dreamed of doing. And it must have worked, because even I, the girl whose worst nightmare is falling off a cliff, briefly contemplated the university climbing wall with an almost longing consideration. That half-formed desire died a moment later, thank god, but it is hard to escape from the sense of adventure this book is fused with.

Rilla’s friends are also awesome, and I liked seeing that awkward friendship blossoming between them. Rilla is clearly a character who hasn’t been afforded many opportunities in life, and she bristles at the thought of being considered ‘white trash’ like she had been back home, so it was great to see her starting to lower her walls and trust people. And I think Lemon portrays these kinds of friendship well. Again, she doesn’t make the whole thing perfect, but just honest and open enough to make us believe in it and liken it to our own experiences.

The rest of the book was a little bit meh for me though. I thought there were some situations, like Rilla arguing with her sister, Thea, or moments with a search and rescue guy called Walker, which just seemed to come totally out of the blue, without any explanation whatsoever. It didn’t make sense. For example [no real spoilers, I promise] there’s a moment when Rilla ends up arguing with Thea in the middle of an evacuation Thea is trying to organize. The row isn’t even about the situation, and it just seems very out of character for Thea to suddenly get into a huge thing with her little sister while she’s trying to do something which could be life-or-death. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t really see the point, and it just left me baffled. The same with Walker. There’s a chemistry there that I liked, but the end of the novel left me feeling let down and conflicted over what I actually wanted for them. Again, no spoilers, but I thought it could have ended differently. It seemed like a very strange and lacklustre end to a good novel.

What I also didn’t really appreciate was how the novel dealt with Rilla and Curtis. There’s a big event that happens before the novel starts which pushes Rilla into going to stay with Thea. Over the course of Valley Girls you learn what it is, and to some extent that big deal is dealt with by Rilla’s behaviour in certain situations, but for the most part I didn’t think it had been addressed enough, considering it was such a big deal she had to move to a different state. To be honest, I don’t know how exactly I’d have preferred for it to be addressed and acknowledged, but I think Lemon downplayed something which is problematic and important by having Rilla almost sweep it under the carpet.

There’s also the minor grammatical and spelling errors peppered throughout the book. I’m not sure if it’s because I was reading a Netgalley ARC or if the finished copy will have them in, but they started to gnaw at me a bit before the end.

Overall, I’d give Valley Girls a 6.5/10. It was a nice, easy read, and I loved the bits where Rilla got to climb with her friends, but I wasn’t sold on the romance or some of the minor plot points, and I finished it feeling a bit underwhelmed.

Unfortunately, this pacing was too slow for me and made the book drag.

When Rilla is shipped off to spend the summer with her older sister in Yosemite National Park she is livid. All her friends and her boyfriend will get to spend the summer together in West Virginia and Rilla isn't ready to let go, she isn't ready to be forgotten by all of them, especially because of the incident that caused her to be sent away.
When she arrives at Yosemite, Rilla is blown away by the majestic beauty, the otherness of her home state and the amount of people that climb for fun, life, and everything in between. As Rilla's life start to interweave with some the climbing folks, she is drawn to climbing and pretty soon it feels like it is in her blood. Walker, a fellow climber, also makes Rilla happy to be spending time in
Yosemite. But as the summer progresses Rila will have to face decisions that include her family, her sister, her love life but most of all what she wants from life and how she wants to live it.
Sarah Nicole Lemon has written an amazing book that I fell in love with, thanks to her kick ass portrayal of Rilla. Go buy this book at your local indie as soon as it is available...you will not be disappointed!

When 17-year-old Rilla is busted for partying 24 hours into arriving in Yosemite National Park to live with her park ranger sister, it’s a come-to-Jesus moment in Valley Girls. 

Determined to make up for her screw-up and create a stable new home for herself, Rilla charms her way into a tight-knit group of climbers. But Rilla can’t help but be seduced by experiences she couldn’t have imagined back home. She sets her sights on climbing El Capitan, one of the most challenging routes in Yosemite, and her summer becomes one harrowing and ecstatic experience after another: first climb, first fall two thousand feet in the air, first love. But becoming the person Rilla feels she was meant to be jeopardizes the reasons why she came to Yosemite—a bright new future and a second chance at sisterhood. When her family and her future are at odds, what will Rilla choose? (via Goodreads)

I received an eARC of Valley Girls from Netgalley, courtesy of publisher Amulet Books, in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book originally because I've heard a lot of great things about the author and her writing of rural characters. When I got accepted, I was happy! Then I saw a thread on twitter from the author that the main character, Priscilla 'Rilla' Skidmore, had undiagnosed ADHD, and it climbed very very far up my reading list.

HOO BOY DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR just replace pot with caffeine. I was lucky that my mom fought to figure out what was going on with me in middle school. So SO many AFAB folks don't get that luxury. https://t.co/5ZkmHBT8gK

— Ceillie (@CandidCeillie) 16 February 2018



Needless to say, I loved a lot about this book.

Rilla starts out as a very bratty character, and really grows into a person throughout the book. She's not a stereotypical sugar-sweet heroine even at the end of the book. She's made of rough edges through the end of the book, which just felt right. She learns to apologize for things she does, and to take responsibility only for things that were her responsibility.

That being said, it needs some content warnings for an abusive relationship, parental abandonment, telling a queer character they needed to come out to family members, theft, near-character death, description of injuries.
I loved the setting of Yosemite in Valley Girls. The descriptions of the park were as lush and beautiful as I imagine the park is in real life. I think it was the perfect place for this story to take place.

One thing I didn't love was the way that Rilla & Thea's polyamorous parents were presented in the narrative. Rilla and Thea are half sisters. They share a mother, but their dads were both a part of the relationship most of the time that they were growing up. Thea calls their mother an addict, something that was shown constantly throughout the story, but adds that one of the things she was addicted to was men. Between that and other characters' comments, it really rubbed me the wrong way.

However, I'm not polyamorous, so I'll leave my complaints at that. I'll let OV reviewers talk about their experience with it.

I loved the treatment of Rilla's family's poverty. The Skidmore's are "wrong side of the tracks" poor people. They are the stereotype of white, rural West Virginia. All three of her parents were in and out of jail for a variety of reasons. Rilla will do anything and everything to make money to do what she wants to do. When she gets to Yosemite, she doesn't even have clothes that fit properly. This is another thing that the side characters that she ingratiates herself with both understand and disbelieve.

If this sounds up your alley, then you might also enjoy Hannah Moskowitz's WILD!

Rating
Overall, I liked Valley Girls a lot. I think it'll be huge for a lot of women like me when I was growing up. If it sounds like something you'd like, pick up a copy at Amazon or Indiebound.



Disclaimer: All links to Indiebound and Amazon are affiliate links, which means that if you buy through those links, I will make a small amount of money off of it.

I was a fan of Lemon's debut novel from 2017 but I struggled to get into her second novel. I did not connect with the main, however, I still liked Lemon's writing style and her use of details. The setting was interesting and unique.

"They looked like they had always been and would always be in Yosemite"

* *
2 / 5

I really, really wanted to love Valley Girls - it promised rock climbing adventures featuring a stubborn, ill-advised teen set against the stunning background of Yosemite. Valley Girls delivered in the sense that the rock climbing aspects were detailed and immersive and the scenery sounded breathtaking and filled me with wanderlust. It failed in that the main character, Rilla Skidmore, is exceedingly annoying with barely any redeeming and endearing qualities.

"All around her, the air seemed cavernous and wide. You're alone. All alone, it breathed."

Rilla's mother sends her packing from West Virginia to live with her older sister Thea, a park ranger in Yosemite after some incident involving a boyfriend and a punch up in a car park that is never explained. Understandably, Rilla isn't that pleased about leaving her immediate family, friends, and home to go and live on a national park with the sister that left her a few years ago. I liked Thea: a young gay woman who struggled with her mother and seemed to have found some peace in Yosemite with her girlfriend, right up until she offers to take on her trouble younger sister who has no motivation to do anything but worry about Instagram and smoke weed.

Then there's Rilla. She's probably the most inconsistent character I've read about in a good few months. Essentially, there's three Rilla's:

Rilla Number One: Skives off school, makes friends with the local weed dealer, calls her ex-boyfriend six times a day, scrolls through Instagram all day thinking about how much better everyone else's life is, is rude to her sister, steals, and is exceedingly petty

Rilla Number Two: Decides that being a rock climber is literally the most glamorous thing ever and posting sexy pics of her climbing is sure to get her old friends running back to her, but simultaneously thinks that all the climber girls she has met hate her for virtually no reason and that, despite people telling her she's decent for a newbie, thinks she's a total failure

Rilla Number Three: Ambitious, motivated, works hard at odd jobs to get money for quality climbing gear so that she can tackle tougher climbs and be a good team member, offers to cook group meals and is generally quite a nice girl who you might actually be friends with

Now you would think that there is quite a clear progression her, a satisfying character arc from Rilla One to Two to Three. There's not. One page you are cheering Rilla on as she tackles an impressive route, envying her life a little as she eats sandwiches on top of a mountain range in one of the most beautiful places in the world, and the next she's throwing a literal tantrum, stealing, driving recklessly, and locking herself in her room. It's bizarre. If Rilla was someone I knew, I'd be seriously concerned between the delusions of grandeur and the acts of self-destruction.

"Mountains do not care who you are, they will kill you all the same"

Valley Girls does have a cool secondary cast between Thea and the rest of the climber girls, and I loved the climbing scenes - I would have particularly enjoyed it if the book had allocated more time to Rilla's climbing of El Capitan which gets shoehorned in at the end. Overall, Valley Girls drew me in with the premise of climbing but was let down by the unlikeable main character.

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of Valley Girls

As someone that used to do climbing (admittedly, though, indoors and in the UK climbing spots, nowhere near as amazing as Yosemite), I really loved the premise and idea of this book. It seems more like a tribute to the National Park than anything, though, which would have made for a good overall story, if I hadn't disliked the main character so intensely.

Rilla is genuinely a terrible person, she has few likeable qualities and it just felt like, to me, throughout this novel, that she was just being a whiny brat for the sake of it. Her chemistry with her friends seemed almost non-existent, as well, and for a book that mainly focuses on friendship, that just didn't work for me.

Rilla is shipped from West Virginia to Yosemite National Park to live with her half-sister Thea because she is the problem maker and partier back in her hometown. Before arriving at the Park, Thea vows to change her awful habits of partying and smoking drugs, claiming that she will enact revenge by turning into a different person than the one that everyone knows her to be. She forgets her vow upon descending into the park and befriends a fellow stoner and proceeds to get drunk and stoned and winds up in park ranger jail.

Once again, this third person narrative was tedious to devour. Rilla was 17/18 and acted like a toddler with tantrums and crying for no reason. I’m positive she was bipolar since she had up and down moments over the course of minutes. She also lived in a false reality where she was obsessed with changing her image so others would approve of the new super cool Rilla that was rock climbing around Yosemite National Park. She developed grand ideas of how to reinvent herself to make others approve of her and make everyone back in her hometown jealous of her new lifestyle. The thing is, she never proceeded to become a fraction of this idolized image. She kept getting into trouble and making bad decisions over and over again when people didn’t conform to her standards.

When she wasn’t swept away in her imaginary world, she was fighting with her sister, falling in instant love with Walker the moment they meet, acting like a toddler when things don’t go her way, always sneaking off to get drunk and stoned when Thea kept warning her that Rilla’s irrational behavior could cost Thea her job, going rock climbing with a group of college students/friends, and having bipolar episodes.

Rilla always claimed she would do something (for example: stop smoking and focus on her summer school work), but by the next paragraph it was long forgotten, and she was off doing things she vowed never to do again. It was tiresome to deal with this indecisive narrator and her bad decisions. She judged everybody she meant and always thought she was in the right when she followed through with her bad decisions. Her and Walker somehow fall in love even though they had little interaction and hated each other at the beginning. The ending was abrupt and left multiple questions without answers. Rilla never grew as a character. She was still a bratty adult by the end who only focused on herself.

Plus, “lightning” was spelled incorrectly multiple times as “lightening”.

I received an ARC of Valley Girls from NetGalley.

A coming of age finding yourself story set in Yosemite with climbing as the impetus of change.

As a climber, I thoroughly enjoyed the obvious knowledge the author had about climbing. The information was given in such a way that it didn't seem like info dump or listing of facts and was eased into conversations. What may have helped was the main characters occasional disinterest in what was being said. Also, a lot of the "montage learning" was mostly skipped over, so key pointers that you'd give to a gumby weren't in the book. I think the passage that spoke to me the most was when Rilla first went up a wall. The panic when she was a few feet up and the breakdown about coming down. Having brought people who have never climbed to the gym and also working at a climbing wall for a summer camp, I have seen that exact scenario play out. Never have I seen it captured on paper so well and hilariously. And honestly, how I personally am when on autobelay. I hate those things. The trajectory of Rilla's climbing seemed a bit ambitious though. It's surprising Rilla wouldn't have popped a tendon or had any finger issues or any other climbing injuries with how she was climbing.

Aside from the climbing, I did think there were some problems in the book. While the main character Rilla was obviously going through things and slowly working through them, there was not anything truly compelling about her problems. And her overall craptastic personality never made you root for her to overcome anything. And even the epiphany moment for her seemed anticlimactic and underwritten.

Most of the side characters were a bit under developed. Rillas sister Thea could have benefitted with more about her and their relationship in West Virginia. And honestly just more about how Thea ended up in Yosemite which didn't quite mesh with the Thea that Rilla had talked about. I did like the formation of the friendships and how tenuous yet tight it all was.

The romance was cliche and eye rolling. Perhaps unnecessary at the end of it all.

The storyline with Ranger Dick Face seemed like an unnecessary stone to throw at the characters. In a book where there's really no real "bad guy", this book tried really hard to make him into almost an absurd over the top villain. And that ended up going nowhere. And that's the same with a few storylines that were completely unnecessaryfor the story being told.

3.25/5 rounds to 3/5.