The Undoing of Thistle Tate by Katelyn Detweiler

I continued my little break from the classics this week with The Undoing of Thistle Tate, a young adult contemporary novel I've had sitting on my shelf for a while now. I initially picked it up on a Barnes and Noble run based on the summary on the inside flap. With my school cancelled for the next two weeks due to the Coronavirus, I found myself with an excess of reading time and figured that now was as good a time as any to pick it up.

The plot follows the eponymous Thistle Tate, a seventeen-year-old author living with her dad in Philadelphia. She has rocketed to international fame with the "Lemonade Skies" series of young adult fantasy novels. She has authored two books in the series so far and is currently working on the third and final one. Both her age and the quality of her book have won her thousands of fans and earned her plenty of money. There is one problem though. She isn't the one actually writing the books. Her whole life is a lie.

Thistle is very uncomfortable with the lie, and longs for the final book in her series to be released so that she can go off to college and start living a normal, low-profile life. However, things veer off course when the real writer of the books suffers a serious injury and is unable to finish the manuscript of the novel. Thistle is left with an increasingly impatient publishing team who can't understand why she is taking so long to finish. To complicate matters further, she starts a romantic relationship with her oldest friend and neighbor, Liam, which starts to sour surprisingly fast. Thistle told him about the true author of the books long ago, and he begins to pressure her to come clean about everything. Thistle is afraid to do this. There might be legal consequences for the deception, and the fallout online from her fans would surely ruin her life. Stuck in her lie and completely miserable, she must decide how to proceed. Should she find a way to continue the lie, or risk telling the truth?

This summary is very bare-bones, because to go into more detail would necessarily spoil some of the reveals, and I enjoyed this story enough that I don't want to do that. I was consistently engaged in this novel throughout my reading, but how much I truly liked it really sneaked up on me. I knew that I had actually grown quite attacked to Thistle once I started getting angry on her behalf at the way certain characters were treating her. This is not just a story about a girl who lied about something big. It is a story about how girls are often asked to sacrifice their well-being to serve the needs of others. How they are often asked to provide support or care at the expense of what is best for them, and the terrible emotional toll that takes. Thistle is asked to take on this lie to make someone else feel better, and she feels so guilty about the prospect of saying no that she agrees to something that she knows is wrong and that she is very uncomfortable with. As a people-pleaser myself, I understand this pressure, and it was interesting to see a young adult novel take this idea on. I enjoyed watching her character grow and change as she dealt with the fallout of her decision to lie.

I also really enjoyed the ending of this novel, which was great because it was not completely perfect. Several characters in this novel behave badly, and their actions are not all forgiven by the end. The situation has a satisfying conclusion, but does not tie up every single thread neatly, which I thought was fairly realistic. Well, at least as realistic as a young adult novel can reasonably get, anyway. Thistle's emotions consistently felt genuine as well. There were definitely teenage dramatics included, and too much weight placed on romantic relationships, but that makes sense for a character that is seventeen years old. I thought the author did a nice job of creating a believable young girl, and I liked following her journey.

I ended up finishing this story in two days, and I mostly enjoyed my experience. The pacing in the middle felt a bit slow, and I didn't really connect with the romantic elements (typical for me and young adult novels), but I liked the main story enough to still really like the book as a whole. This is the kind of book I will definitely recommend to some of my upper level readers, as it has enough drama to keep them engaged and themes that are worth exploring. This was a surprising little gem to get lost in during my unexpected quarantine, and honestly, that's exactly what I needed at the moment. 


Challenge Tally
Total Books Read in 2020: 20