Jessica Brody
Farrar Straus Giroux
Published August 2, 2016
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
After a horrible Monday in which her local rock-star boyfriend dumps her and she makes a fool of herself at a speech in front of the whole student body, Ellison Sparks makes a promise. She vows she’ll make things right if she could only have a chance to do things over. So, when the next morning dawns Monday all over again, she realizes she has exactly that chance. As Ellie scrambles to fix everything that went wrong the first time (and second time and third time…), Ellie begins to wonder if maybe the things she fights for so desperately aren’t the things that really make her happy after all. She finally learns what her heart wants when it suddenly seems the most out of reach, but if she can’t find true happiness, she’ll be stuck in her Monday nightmare forever.
I was a little dubious about picking this book up because it looked like one of those, “she had it all” kinds of stories. You know, the type where the girl has everything she could possibly want and then drama plus tragedy happens. Too often I find the main character in those stories to be shallow and care way too much about her looks and how hot her boyfriend is. Just really not something that speaks to me.
Also, I really liked Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver which has kind of a similar-ish plot in terms of the do-over situation, so I worried that I wouldn’t be able to avoid comparing the two, which wouldn’t really give A Week of Mondays a fair shot.
The truth? While I still really like Before I Fall, I liked that A Week of Mondays is a lighter story. In Before I Fall, Samantha’s friends drove me crazy. I liked the characters in A Week of Mondays better—I don’t mean that they were necessarily written better, but they were more likeable. (And they were supposed to be, so on that count– total success.)
I was a little nervous when Ellie decides that to keep her boyfriend, she needs to go all sexy vixen on him. First, it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine when an inexperienced girl suddenly has all these advanced super-sexy moves. Like, where did that come from? I just find it a little hard to believe and I think it sets the standards really high. But though Ellie seems at first to succeed with her plan, her moves don’t ultimately alter the outcome of her relationship, and her best friend reminds her that being herself, and being loved for who she is, is what’s really important.
I liked the whole banter back and forth between her and her bestie on the legal drama love. It gave their friendship some authenticity and made it unique—it’s a shared interest I’ve never seen in YA literature before.
On the whole, I thought this was a fun, quirky story that had a lot of depth to it, though it took some shallow detours along the way. If you like upbeat contemporary romance, you’ll want to add A Week of Mondays to your reading list.
Cultural Elements
Major characters are white and straight.
Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used with mild frequency.
Romance/Sexual Content
Boy/girl kissing (with a couple mentions of tongue being down throats). Ellie wears a provocative outfit and is pleased by the way it affects her boyfriend.
Spiritual Content
Ellie makes a prayer to a nonspecific entity asking for a chance to make things right. Her fortune cookies seem to speak to what’s happening in her life, and she begins to rely on them for information about how successful she’s being in her life.
Violent Content
Two girls get into a fist fight.
Drug Content
Ellie goes to a party looking for her friend. The house is filled with drunk teens dancing to loud music, so she leaves.
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