Can’t Look Away / Donna Cooner
Scholastic Inc., 2014, 265 pp.
Realistic Fiction

Being a well-known blogger online, your sister dies, and almost everyone knows about it. It tears up your emotions and your family as well. Don’t forget that you move to a new town and school with worrying about that too. I guess you just can’t look away from this life.

Torrey Grey is a famous beauty-guru on YouTube. You would at least expect for her life to be glamorous and everything in the perfect place like her makeup and shoes. But that’s not how it always goes. When a tragic event takes place in her life, right in front of her eyes, her new unpainted walls isn’t the only thing incomplete in her life. Torrey’s younger sister Miranda dies and so does her spirit. Her mom and dad blame it on Torrey but she feels guilty as well. Does she handle it well? Well no, she blocks herself out from the real world. The internet world in Torrey’s eyes. No more YouTube videos, no more updates, tweets, pictures on Instagram. Nothing; everything blank and full of memories like her mind and heart. However, tabloids as people call it, believe she’s using Miranda’s death to an advantage. Such as, gaining more followers and subscribers. Although she hasn’t said anything, Torrey is soaking it in giving one less care about the real world. In the real world, she’s doing the exact opposite. Despairing. When she comes to her new town, the unexpected happens. She never thought she would ever have to try to be in the popular group like she was at home. And she definitely didn’t think that her ‘so called’ ex-best friend-Zoe-would betray her. As Torrey comes to the conclusion that nobody knows who she really is and about her sister’s death, everything seems to be going fine. Until Luis comes along with el Dia de los Muertos; also known as Day of the Dead, so much seems to make sense to her now. Miranda’s death haunts her over and over in everyday things that such a silly holiday matters so much now.

Can’t Look Away is a relatable and worth-the-while realistic book that has you hooked. Written in first person narrative, Cooner grants you a look on the perspective of a young teenage girl’s life in modern day situations. Metaphors and similes used throughout the book show how significant a life drowned in by the lights could block out the most essential and real dealings in reality. Symbolism also showed in the story brings out the factual existence of similarity between what society holds to be irrelevant, that can truly compose the same feelings on the inside. Never could anyone think differently about another person from the outside, after reading this extraordinary specimen of unseen makings before your eyes.

Donna Cooner has given me the urge to read this book again, or another of her own, due to the amazing writing and story that was told. I finished the book in just five days and usually it takes me over a month in general. Although there were parts that seemed to have no interest, I couldn’t put the book down. While reading Can’t Look Away, I found a state of dreamland in my mind as though Torrey Grey, other characters in the book, and every little detail in the story were real life events and I couldn’t stop the excitement from coming. Not judging a book by their cover and to never tell someone else’s past from yours is what most people would state the theme of the book is. However to me, I think otherwise. You can’t define yourself or life’s events in action, unless you give it the power to-now that’s a moral experience that I didn’t look away from.