Please Ignore Vera Dietz Book Review

Please Ignore Vera Dietz, by A. S. King, is a fiction novel about a girl named Vera and the mystery of what happened to her best friend Charlie Kahn. At the beginning of the novel Vera is attending her best friend’s funeral after he has died suddenly. Throughout the novel Vera is faced with the nagging of Charlie’s ghost constantly trying to get her to clear his name, trying to forget that her mom left her and her dad to be a stripper in Las Vegas, and the everyday struggles that a teen faces in their life. Throughout Vera’s life all she ever wants is to grow up to be her own person and not take after her mother or father, but could some of the choices lead her down the path she so desperately wants to avoid?

A huge key to this novel and why the novel is so good is because of the main character Vera. Readers could make the argument that Charlie is the most important character due to his secret and death but Vera takes the ranks. She is an interesting and conflicting character and has very many traits about her that the reader is introduced to. When she talks about the flashbacks and reflects on her experiences, she is a completely different character than in the present. In the flashbacks her and Charlie are very good friends and have strong deep feelings for each other, but it all changes when Charlie pushes himself away from her and hits her one day on the bleachers. This is why she tells the reader that she loves and hates Charlie after his death. Another big difference in Vera’s life is that in her flashbacks she never was drinking and was an innocent girl that thought boys were gross and didn’t want any involvement with them besides Charlie. In the present tense Vera is into boys and begins to experiment with them and she has a drinking problem. She drinks all of the time to help deal with the pain she feels about Charlie’s death and is hungover most of the time. As a character she also clears Charlies name and this is why she is so important. Nobody wanted to believe that Charlie was innocent and nobody ever cared about and loved him as much as Vera. She was the only one who had the heart to tell the truth about the mystery and admit to everything that happened that caused Charlie’s death. Without her Charlie would always have been thought to of burn down the pet store and would have always thought to have been a bad kid. Because of Vera Charlie was cleared and his reputation was put back into tact.

One big theme or lesson from this book that the reader should take is to always have your friend or family's back. In this story Vera has many problems with the people she is around such as Mick, her mother, her dad, and Charlie. Other characters have issues with each other like Charlie and Jenny and Ken and Cindy but at the end of the novel everyone has each others back. When it comes down to it, Vera has Charlie’s back and clears his name, Ken is there for his daughter to make sure that Vera heads down a good path of life, and James protects Vera from Mick. The message in this book from King shows the reader that even though there are personal “beefs” and discrepancies each character is there for each other and want to make sure that everyone is okay and in our real life that is what we should do for our family to.

As this semester has gone by I have read many novels that I would never had chosen on my own and each time the novel has been better and better but not this time. This novel was very good and I would recommend it to anyone but it just could not top my list. Dark Matter still sits at number one and will remain there. I liked how this book had different point of views from multiple characters because it gave the reader the story from many different angles and I am glad that I ended our last book of the year on a good one like this.