Review: Between the Notes

Between the Notes by Sharon Huss Roat
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release Date: June 16th, 2015
Source: Edelweiss
Date Read: 6/14/15 to 6/15/15
400 pages

Rating: ✰✰

When Ivy Emerson’s family loses their house—complete with her beloved piano—the fear of what’s to come seizes her like a bad case of stage fright. Only this isn’t one of her single, terrifying performances. It’s her life.

And it isn’t pretty.

Ivy is forced to move with her family out of their affluent neighborhood to Lakeside, also known as “the wrong side of the tracks.” Hiding the truth from her friends—and the cute new guy in school, who may have secrets of his own—seems like a good idea at first. But when a bad boy next door threatens to ruin everything, Ivy’s carefully crafted lies begin to unravel . . . and there is no way to stop them.

As things get to the breaking point, Ivy turns to her music, some unlikely new friends, and the trusting heart of her disabled little brother. She may be surprised that not everyone is who she thought they were . . . including herself.

Debut author Sharon Huss Roat crafts a charming and timely story of what happens when life as you know it flips completely upside down.

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So uh. This is sad. I figured this would be a wonderful and magical tale about playing the piano and how it heals the soul or something of that matter. But nope. This was absolutely nothing like I expected it to be.

Between The Notes centers around the main character, Ivy, who ends up moving to this poor neighborhood because her parents can no longer support their well off lifestyle while paying for her brother's therapy. She's afraid that everyone will make fun of her and her social life WILL BE RUINED, so she goes through great lengths to hide the fact that she now lives in a turd-like house in the "slums", also known as Lakeside.

There are a number of reasons why this book did not work for me. Such as...

The fact that this book revolves around social status.

Like why. WHY. I do not care! At a young age, I did not care at all what I wore or what people thought I did or where I lived or anything. Maybe it's just my town, but I don't even think there was a sole popular group! People were just in their own cliques! Basically, in the novel, Ivy is friends with these two girls, and she's only in it for the social status. Even her best friend, Reesa, sometimes ditched her because of the move. THIS IS HORRIBLE. Her best friend doesn't even support her at all. And she makes it seem like this situation, one that Ivy can't even control, is the worst thing to ever happen. Ugh.

There's a sort of love triangle

And....well I wasn't sold. There's these two guys. One lives in the same neighborhood, the other is rich. She hangs out with both of them. And she doesn't want to be seen with "bad boy" because he lives next door in the same "shitty" neighborhood, and she treats him coldly one day and nice the other (only when she needs him of course). AND SHE TOTALLY DOESN'T DESERVE HIM, he is way too nice for her.

Sending the message that living in a bad area makes you a bad person.

This pissed me off the most, especially since even the parents were not happy with living in a supposedly bad area, from what I've read, isn't bad at all? It's just POOR. SEE THAT'S THE THING. Apparently being poor means you're sad and unhappy and sure maybe you don't have everything in the world, that doesn't mean you should be ostracized at school! What has the world come to.

Man. I am done. To sum it up, yes there was piano playing, but no, not as much as I wanted there to be. This was a book that mainly focused on where you lived, how rich you were, and how that played in your social status at school. Even though the main character came to her senses in the end, I was still so infuriated with the beginning that I couldn't rate it higher.