Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous by Suzanne Park - OPTIONAL

Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous by Suzanne Park, 352 pages. Sourcebooks, 2021. $11

Language: R (35 swears, 4 “f”); Mature Content: PG-13 (underage drinking, minor drug references, one off-screen allusion to sex); Violence: G; 

BUYING ADVISORY: HS - OPTIONAL 

AUDIENCE APPEAL: AVERAGE 

Korean-American teenager Sunny Song is an up and coming social media star based in LA, but after a live baking disaster goes viral for all the wrong reasons, Sunny is shipped off to a digital detox summer camp on a farm in Iowa. Sunny is determined to hang onto her sliver of fame, even going as far as to smuggle a burner phone and WiFi signal booster onto the premises so she can compete in a content creator competition. But the longer she is unplugged, the more she realizes how important IRL connections can be. 

 I wanted to like this more than I did. There is a lot going on in this book - social media addiction, bullying, mean girls, parental relationship drama, teen summer romance, and dealing with insta-fame - but the book doesn’t deal meaningfully with any of it. The best part of the book was the small group sessions, where there are some insightful lessons touched on but they are fleeting and not really incorporated well into the rest of the plot. The main character doesn’t really grow, the teen romance is superficial, and everything wraps up all too neatly in the end. It’s a cute fish-out-of-water tale, but not much more than that. 

Reviewer: #BookswithBeddes