Zoe Rosenthal is Not Lawful Good by Nancy Werlin

 genre: contemporary young adult fiction

Zoe has become obsessed with the new science fiction television show Bleeders.  Obsessed enough that she'd lie to everyone she cares about and sneak down to Atlanta to go to a comic con where she can watch the premiere of season 2.  THAT obsessed.  After that, though, she's going to buckle down and apply to college with her perfect boyfriend Simon and live a Purposeful Life.  And a purposeful life can't involve cosplay and television show obsessions, right?  Except at the con she meets fellow Bleeder lovers that start to feel like her PEOPLE.  And all of a sudden one lie turns into lots of lies and Zoe isn't sure who she really is anymore.  Luckily, she's got her bullet journal to help her sort out her priorities.  It's all gonna work out. She's sure of it.

There are so many people who will relate to Zoe's love of Bleeders.  I myself have had seasons where my obsession with the continuation of a story (in my case, the anticipation of Harry Potter number 7) can connect you completely with strangers.  I appreciated that the cosplay world is presented with authenticity and without judgement. I thought the bullet journal literary devise worked well.   I liked the things that Zoe figured out about herself throughout the book but it was hard to watch her make so many ridiculous and frankly dangerous choices without a lot of consequences.  It felt a bit over-the-top politically correct in a way that sometimes felt a little pedantic but it was nice to see a range of colors and genders.  The idea of "lawful good" struck me as interesting and I liked that angle of the story, that our choices and way of looking at the world exists on a sort of continuum (my son, a D&D player, saw the book on the table and explained it to me before I'd even read it!)   I didn't fall in love with it but I think there are a lot of teen readers who will find a little piece of themselves in here somewhere, hopefully learning along the way that it is better to be true to yourself and what you love than to the idea of you that someone else has.