Lenore Appelhans

Riley lives in TropeTown, the place where all the stock characters hang out when they're not currently being used by authors to create stories. He's a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, an exceedingly rare variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. (In fact, he's the only one there at the moment.) And he's just been ordered into therapy for talking back to an author for trying to write him into a stupid situation. From there, he develops a crush on a fellow Pixie, is frequently interrupted by being written into a (fairly terrible, if you ask me) YA novel, and discovers that the Manic Pixie trope is in danger of being retired entirely.

This is one of those books I feel like I enjoyed more than I quite ought to, somehow. When I started it, I was hoping for some weird and wacky meta-ness, and maybe a bit of sharp satire on the whole Manic Pixie Dream Girl concept. As it turns out, the meta-ness is mildly clever and amusing, but not quite the wildly and brilliantly inventive thing I might have wished for, and the commentary on the trope is mostly fairly shallow, with a brief descent or two into over-earnestness. The plot ultimately turns out to be pretty thin, too, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole thing does get a bit too silly, making it not nearly as satisfying in the end as it should have been.

And yet. And yet, it was also warm and fun and cute, and apparently very much the sort of thing my slightly stressed-out brain was in the mood for just now, and I think I was smiling at least a little bit through a lot of it. Yeah, yeah, embarrassing as it is, I suppose you could maybe say that despite myself it won me over with its quirky, quirky ways and its vivacious lust for life, or something. Not completely, in the end. But maybe just enough.… (mehr)

Where do I even begin with this book? I know it's early in the year, but this has to be one of my favourites that I've read this year. It has a good message, it's completely unique, I loved the characters, and I just felt so good reading it that I spread it out as long as I could, which is something that I don't often do.

Check out my full review here!

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https://iwriteinbooks.wordpress.com/2019/01/10/the-manic-pixie-dream-boy-improve...

So, I have a confession.

When I was younger, I loved the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or Boy when they were present) trope. I resonated with the spunky, energetic, quirkiness so much. I’ve always been a little bit MPDG, probably.

But as I got older, I started looking at the trope a little bit differently. While I was a free spirit and hyperactive, I still had my own goals and dreams. I won’t turn this into a dissertation on gender role expectations but needless to say, I fell out of love with the role type, at least in the more obvious incarnations (I’m looking at you, Garden State and Elizabethtown.)

Flashforward to the present and I find myself longing for the days when I had fewer grounded responsibilities. I think that’s why The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project resonated with me so deeply. Most of the appeal of the trope is that we all gravitate toward the spark we’ve either lot along the way, or never had to begin with. The shining, sparkly, fun, abandon calls to even the grumpiest among us.

Without giving too much of the story away, the book follows Riley, a Trope Town Manic Pixie Dream Boy, through what is sure to be a world-ending, disaster of an identity crisis, as his entire existence is called into question by the authority he and the rest of the town’s stock characters answer to. Through self-questioning, group therapy, and yes, manic pixie hijinx, a much deeper, softer, undercurrent of discovery runs through the story.

The bok turned out to be far deeper and more complex than I anticipated but then again, that’s the thing with Manic Pixie Dream folks; they just look sparkly when we’re down in the dumps and they come to rescue us. Off the page, they tend to be full, whole people with their own identities. And so are we.… (mehr)