Parker was perfect, but now she's not. After ODing on sleeping pills and liquor, Parker is doing her best to make sure the world gives up on her and leaves her alone. Being inside Parker's head as she silently suffers PTSD flashbacks, has panic attacks, and does her best to alienate herself from everyone who cares is painful. Parker is an incredibly unlikable protagonist, but that's the point. We know people care about her, and that her year of trying to be as unlikable as possible hasn't stopped the people who loved her before from continuing to love her now. There must be something redeemable about her if these characters still hold out hope for her, even if she's doing her best to prove she's beyond help.

This isn't for everyone, but it was for me. Parker is unlikable in a lot of the ways I think I can be unlikable. A stubborn perfectionist with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Black & white thinking. Believing you are the center of the universe and if you aren't perfect everything will fall apart. This book is messy and honest and hard to read, but it is so powerful. I think a lot of girls will recognize elements of themselves in Parker, and also recognize her foolishness in refusing help.

Unfortunately this was not the book for me. I didn't find anything happened and I just wanted more from the book which it didn't provide me.
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I didn't enjoy the characters and the plot was all over the place.

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. Unfortunately, it was archived before I downloaded it. I will make sure this does not happen again.

Thank you Wednesday Books for gifting me an E-Arc in exchange of an honest opinion. All opinions are my own.

I rate this book a 3.5 out of 5 Stars.

I LOVED Sadie, and I recommended that book to everyone. I loved every single thing about it. So when Wednesday reached out about reviewing this one, I was stoked!

I liked it, and I flew through the pages. Parker is a bitch, she is snarky, rude, sarcastic, and really, really hard to like. However, I think we are supposed to feel this about her. The question I kept asking myself is what happened to her, to make her treat people this way. Why is she so guarded?

When I got the answer to what happened, it helped me understand, and I feel like Parker’s behavior was warranted. Maybe not to the people she directed it to, but I understood it.

When I started reading it, I had a sense of dread and I was nervous to progress into the story, I kept waiting for something terrible to happen, something that would be hard to stomach. If you have read the book, you know what I mean. However, Summers wrote this book with tact, and when it gets to the big bad, it was easy to handle.

Wow! This book was super good but also very intense. It's very well written and I think it shows a scary side of mental illness. How this very perfect girl on the outside was very not ok on the inside and how well she hid it. It has a few sad moments and it will definitely make you think have have many emotions while reading it. This one is definitely a Top Read for this year. I will recommend this book to everyone.

Courtney summers crushed it again!
The author has a special talent in breaking readers hearts and making them question everything.
The book was spectacular, incredibly well written and left me hanging at the end of every chapter!
Loved it!!

3.5 stars

This is a republished version of Courtney Summers' (author of Sadie) first book, Cracked Up to Be. It's about Parker, the ideal, perfect high school student: captain of the cheerleading team and straight A student, relentlessly determiend to do everything right. Until she makes a mistake. and her whole perfect world comes shattering down around her. Her new goal becomes to make everyone she cares about dislike her, so that she won't have to worry about living up to their expectations again.

Parker is not a likeable character. But she is not trying to be likeable, not with her peers and family and not with the reader. She wants everyone to hate her, because she hates herself. I was equal parts frustrated by and heartbroken for Parker. It's hard to read a a book about a character who is determined to do everything possible to make everyone dislike her. Page after page after page, Parker pushes everyone away with the cruelest words possible. It made her an unsympathetic character, yet I also felt deep symapthy for her at the same time. Parker is a girl who is deeply hurt and lost, and I just wanted to figure out a way to help her!

I thought this was an interesting exploration of what goes on in the mind of a "mean girl." Most people who are being unkind have deeper issues going on within them. This story gives you a glimpse into the mind of girls like Parker, and it's a helpful insight into why mean girls do what they do.

I was frustrated by the ending of this book. It felt very abrupt! Parker was spiraling out of control, and then all of a sudden, everything is okay and she is going to get help and the end. The resolution did not feel realistic, and it all happened so fast.

I am not sure it is accurate to say that I "liked" this book, as it's not a super enjoyable book to read. But I thought it was thought-provoking, and I appreciated the insight into Parker's life and mind and the empathy it created in me.

However, Parker felt real and solid and a jagged and broken sort of way. Her dialogue was cutting and witty and timely. Watching her break down over the course of the novel was... enlightening. The snatches of flashbacks were brilliantly integrated into the story, beginning as a teaser and ending with the choppy final cut of a movie montage as everything clicks into place.

One of the things I can really appreciate is that all of the characters (except for Becky but she was this weird stand-in for a nemesis to be the butt of Parker's jokes) were likeable and genuinely good people. It gives extra dimension to Parker and the overall story. I do wish Jessie was a little more present in the story - and Evan as well; it would give the buildup more impact.

The prose has this stumbling inevitability that made it feel both painfully authentic and impossible to put down. If I hadn't had life obligations, I probably would have read this in one sitting. Again, comparing with Sadie, you can really see the growth that Summers has undergone, but she could captivate an audience even 12 years ago.

Cracked Up to Be showcases what Summers is great at as a writer: delving deep into the gritty underbelly of life as a young woman. That grit may rub some readers wrong, but her process of letting readers discover her characters through story has always been a piece that I enjoy. And because of it, every moment of characterization and story progression ultimately feels earned and worth the journey. This story is not for the faint of heart, but it was incredibly moving and painful to fall into.

There are turning points to everyone's journey, but what I love about Summers' is that she takes that point and turns it into the whole story. And even though Parker is troubled and struggling, you feel as if she's as normal as you were as a teenager and all it would've taken was that one moment to bring you on a parallel path with her. Everyday moments are humanized, choices are whittled down to fractions, and through it all you see deeply into who Parker truly is—and who she was. The characters around her—while not as deeply explored but still just as palpable—become a way to further explain her story and choices and that's not a tactic you see very often—but when done well, it can feel immersive as hell. Through it all, this story touched on so many things that ripped into my heart and made my heart twist with pain, but despite all of that, I wish there was more of it, more to how it ended...to make it feel complete.

As someone who loved Sadie I was definitely excited to read this book by the same author. Unfortunately, it was not for me. There was a lot going on when it came to school drama but I didn't find myself interested. I also wasn't interested in any of the characters.

Parker was the "perfect" girl. She was popular and at one point a cheerleader. She definitely went through some things but I never connected to her. I never felt anything for her situations. The other characters were rather bland and didn't feel like they had a lot going on when it came to development.

I would say that the plot is pretty fast paced and lot goes on but also not a lot? If that makes sense. Most of the time school drama like this just isn't for me  so in a way I'm not surprised that this plot didn't work for me but since it was written by an author I already have read I had hope for it.

Overall, this book just wasn't for me. I don't have a lot to say about it because nothing clicked for me.

When I requested this title I didn’t realize it was a re- release for an anniversary edition and that I had already read - and loved- it about 7 years ago. But since I didn’t really remember much except an art project I decided to take advantage of this copy and do a re read because I know I liked it the first time. And I know I like Courtney Stevens books.

I think this time I enjoyed the MC more because I just liked her sassiness and her total uncompromising attitude. I could respect her. She’s a really nasty piece of work and I LOVED that about her. She doesn’t just go along to get along. She challenges everyone and everything including herself.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I appreciate the opportunity of reading a revised version of the first novel of Courtney Summers. Like many others, I first "met" this author through Sadie. So it is actually pretty interesting to go back and read an earlier book. This too has a strong female protagonist. It is a bit more YA than the others, with a heavy high school setting, but it is a nice reading as well.

Two years ago when I read Courtney Summers’ novel Sadie (see my review here) I said “it’s like you’re watching a horrific accident occurring in real-time. You know that events can only worsen, but you can’t look away.” Cracked Up To Be is a lot like that, but instead the main character of Parker is the train wreck.

Parker is mean and manipulative. It takes pages to warm up to her character as Summers slowly scratches Parker’s surface and allows the reader to glimpse this actually fragile teenager. While I didn’t hate her by the end of the novel, I still wasn’t certain that I liked her. I understood her to some degree but as for “liking?” As I’ve previously mentioned in reviews, it’s not a prerequisite for liking a novel to like the main character and that’s true here.

Just as Summers slowly revealed Parker’s real character, she also reveals the actual occurrences that preceded the beginning of the book. The party that ultimately resulted in suicide attempts, rape, and a missing girl. While it’s not a psychological thriller in the respect of someone’s life physically being threatened, it is from the perspective of someone’s mental state being threatened.

Cracked Up To Be is character-driven and is about a character who will stay in your mind for a long while after the final page.

One last word. I always avoid spoilers in my reviews. There’s nothing worse than someone telling you what happens. However, something does happen in Cracked Up To Be that left me extremely upset, the crying kind of upset. As you probably know these are referred to as triggers so I am placing this spoilerish trigger below my rating. If you follow my blog, you might already know what it is. Whether the author needed it to happen in the story to make it a stronger story, I don’t know. I don’t think so.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I liked Parker. I feel like this says something about me, that I'm empathetic or super callous, or maybe both. I also feel that all books should come with a warning if the dog dies. I don't care if it's a plot point or a relevant emotional moment. I really can't go on this way.

Raw, edgy and heartbreaking, Courtney Summers’s CRACKED UP TO BE is a gut-wrenching tale of the girl who had it all, the girl at the top of the high school heap, but something happened and she plummeted into a world of darkness and self-destruction. She needs help, but what we get are shadow figures of those who should be helping and no help from professionals trained to be bring her out of her darkness.

If Parker’s self-coping mechanism of snark and nastiness aren’t enough to turn you away, seeing them as a cry for help will break your heart, because to me, no one answered. I was disappointed in the weakness of the surrounding characters, they were vague cutouts, but I wondered if that is just how Parker saw them.

Still I struggled with this book, Parker is not likable, yet, that is not all her fault. She went from being the perfect person, or striving to be, to a broken girl who experienced something that broke her. She fell from the pedestal she placed herself on, shattered from the pressure to maintain an image she learned was not that important in the scheme of life…and still, no one was her rock.

I was disappointed with how the issues were handled and depressed when I finished one. I continue to ask, where was the adult support?

I received a complimentary ARC re-release copy from St. Martin's Griffin! This is my honest and voluntary review.

Content warnings: Rape, suicidal attempts, a dog dies, flippant remarks about suicide/wanting to die/wanting to kill oneself if they were x person, underage drinking, brief mentions of murder, mental health/anxiety issues.

!!This is not a spoiler free review!!

I honestly should have let myself DNF this book at 30 pages.

I picked it up because I really loved Sadie by Courtney Summers, and this one popped up on Net Galley with a 5 day reading window before it would be archived. I honestly did not expect to get approved. So I read the book. And I didn’t like it.

I wasn’t aware that this book was 10 years old already, until I read the author’s note at the start of the book. And honestly, you could tell just how dated this book was by some of the language used in it.

I understand what this book was trying to do – what Parker was trying to do, but I just didn’t enjoy the way it was done, and it left me feeling rather… icky.

Parker is perfect – it’s what she strives for, and one night, she gets shitfaced drunk at her boyfriend’s party.

At this party, she’s just as horrible as always, but she’s even perfect at that, and after telling her supposed best friend, Jessie, that her boyfriend was cheating on her, Jessie goes and flirts with some college guys who crashed the party.

Jessie is raped in the woods, and then murdered. Parker witnesses a part of the rape, and because she is so horrendously drunk, she does nothing about it.

After that, she tries to kill herself because she didn’t do anything to stop the rape, and she’s living with all of this guilt. She survives the attempted suicide and then proceeds to shut everyone in her life out so that when she is ready to try again, she won’t be hurting anyone in her life because she’ll have no one.

This book touches on a lot of heavy topics. Again, I understand what this book was trying to do, I just don’t think it hit the mark for me.

I always really enjoy the writing and the characters from this author. I feel like this story was very important to hear and Courtney really has a way with words. She truly makes you feel emotion with every sentence. Since this book is not very long I dont want to give away too much with my review but I will say I very much enjoyed my experience and will continue to pick up this authors writing! I also love the rereleased cover!

Wow. This book caught me from the first page and I didn't want to put it down. I listened to Courtney Summers' Sadie as an audiobook and loved it, so I was definitely on board for whatever else she wrote.
I just couldn't stop reading this because I needed to know what happened. There's so few details of what happened and they're doled out so slowly that the reader is on the edge, waiting for more information. The best thing about Courtney Summers' books are that they are so real and raw. They have dark themes and need a million trigger warnings but they're so real.

I didn't realize that I have read this already. Courtney is a phenomenal writer. I really enjoyed Parker's character, even though she was rough around the edges.

Didn't really care about the stereotypical characters. However, i think my teen students would appreciate this more than i did.