#Review: SCREEN QUEENS by Lori Goldstein

SCREEN QUEENS

Author: Lori Goldstein
Series: N/A
Source: ARC via Publisher; Purchased from Audible
Publisher: Razorbill
Publication Date: June 11, 2019
Overall Rating:
Diversity Rating:

Summary:
The Bold Type meets The Social Network when three girls vying for prestigious summer internships through a startup incubator program uncover the truth about what it means to succeed in the male-dominated world of tech.

This summer Silicon Valley is a girls' club.

Three thousand applicants. An acceptance rate of two percent. A dream internship for the winning team. ValleyStart is the most prestigious high school tech incubator competition in the country. Lucy Katz, Maddie Li, and Delia Meyer have secured their spots. And they've come to win.

Meet the Screen Queens.

Lucy Katz was born and raised in Palo Alto, so tech, well, it runs in her blood. A social butterfly and CEO in-the-making, Lucy is ready to win and party.

East Coast designer, Maddie Li left her home and small business behind for a summer at ValleyStart. Maddie thinks she's only there to bolster her graphic design portfolio, not to make friends.

Delia Meyer taught herself how to code on a hand-me-down computer in her tiny Midwestern town. Now, it's time for the big leagues--ValleyStart--but super shy Delia isn't sure if she can hack it (pun intended).

When the competition kicks off, Lucy, Maddie, and Delia realize just how challenging the next five weeks will be. As if there wasn't enough pressure already, the girls learn that they would be the only all-female team to win ever. Add in one first love, a two-faced mentor, and an ex-boyfriend turned nemesis and things get...complicated.

Filled with humor, heart, and a whole lot of girl power, Screen Queens is perfect for fans of Morgan Matson, Jenny Han, and The Bold Type

Purchase:

Amazon | Chapters | TBD

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book and chose to review it. This in no way impacts my opinion.

I thought this one was a bit too long, even though it had a lot of very valuable conversations. I would have liked a bit more from it - or a condensed version - because at almost 400 pages, it was too much. I found myself feeling like this one was dragging at 40% and that's not how this type of book should be.

SCREEN QUEENS does a good job of showing the hardships of being a woman in STEM while empowering women to stand up for themselves and for what they believe in. It does have a fairly predictable plot, but the conversations in here are so well done that I am more than okay with not being overly shocked but what was to come.

I thought the characters were all well developed and felt really different from one another, which was good considering we had all their perspectives in this one. I thought as an audiobook, it was very well done and I enjoyed my listen to it. It made the read feel faster than when I was trying to get through my (massive) ARC.

I would have liked this to be about 150 pages shorter. I thought that while the conversations were all important, and I liked seeing how the competition unfolded, there just was too much of everything. I thought that some of it could have been condensed and brought into shorter chapters that still would have provided the same amount of development.

But! If you're looking for a good STEM book that has some cute romance, great conversations, and a fun story, this is the book for you!