Blog Tour, Review & Giveaway: This Tiny Perfect World by Lauren Gibaldi

This Tiny Perfect World by Lauren Gibaldi was just released this week and I am excited to be a part of this blog tour! Check out all the book information, my spoiler-free review, and a fun behind the scenes post about my personal experience in the drama club. Also, there is a tour wide giveaway for a copy of This Tiny Perfect World, as well as an exclusive giveaway for a swag pack!

 

This Tiny Perfect World by Lauren Gibaldi

Category: Young Adult, Contemporay
Publication: February 27th, 2018; HarperTeen
Purchase: Amazon, B&N, iBooks, TBD, Kobo, IndieBound

Penny loves her small-town Florida life, and she has her future mapped out. She’s going to community college after graduation to stay close to home and her best friend, Faye. She’ll take over the family diner that her dad has been managing since her mother died. And one day, she’ll marry her high school sweetheart, Logan.

But when she unexpectedly lands a scholarship to a prestigious summer theater camp, she is thrust into a world of competition and self-doubt. And suddenly, her future gets a little hazy. As she meets new friends, including Chase, a talented young actor with big-city dreams, she begins to realize that maybe the life everyone (including her) expects her to lead is not the one she was meant to have.

 

Review:

[book rating=3.5/5]

“I’m not leaving. I’m not risking everything on a wild dream. Not my style.”

This Tiny Perfect World is a sweet book about Penny, a 17 year old, who is spending her last summer before her senior year of school at a drama camp at the local college. She just recently got into acting at school and she decided it couldn’t hurt to try out for the theater camp, and to her surprise she not only got in but got the scholarship to go as well.

While at camp, Penny does a lot of self-discovery. She realizes she is a good actor, and gains confidence, but she also grows personally too. She really never thought too much about what she would do after high school. She always planned on working at her family’s little cafe and honoring her mother’s memory by doing what her mother loved to do. Summer camp has thrown her sense of self out the window. She now is second guessing everything she thought she knew.

I absolutely loved all the theater aspects of the book, if you liked theater and acting, I think you will find these aspects to ring very true. I connected to these themes since I too was a theater nerd back in high school. I loved how Lauren represented the anxiety of auditioning, the action of learning to accept criticism, and the feeling of transforming into someone else.

Penny has two best friends, Faye who is a strong and kind. And Logan who has been her friend pretty much her whole life, and only recently did they move into the lovers part of their relationship. The three of them were pretty much inseparable, until this summer, where Faye & Logan have full-time jobs, and Penny is off at day camp. Penny also makes a few friends at camp, Sam, who is a sweet and confident girl who plans to move to NYC to be an actress. And there’s Chase, an obnoxious, good looking boy who already has had some gigs on TV shows that were filmed in his old hometown in Georgia. He plans to head off the LA to take the acting world by storm.

The friendships in this book were so well portrayed. I loved them. Even the relationship between Penny and her dad. Absolutely perfect. However, there were so many things I didn’t like. Chase is the typical entitled good looking male. He infuriated me, and of course caused a lot of drama that occurred outside of the stage. But I understand his presence was important. It helped Penny understand that not everything she thinks she has planned for her perfect life is actually perfect. A reminder that at 17 you shouldn’t pigeonhole yourself into a future when you have never seen what is outside of your hometown.

All in all this is a wonderful example of a coming-of-age novel. Penny has her life planned out, but unexpected occurrences can always change your path, if you have the courage to grow or stand your ground. This Tiny Perfect World will resonate with anyone who struggles to find their place in this world and the struggle with accepting who you are with who you want to be.

 

Behind the Scenes: Kelly’s Acting Career

So flash back to a very young Kelly…I wanted to be an actress. I wanted to dance and sing too. I thought I was great and my family encouraged me to be the best me. I did musical theater, choir, every type of dance class, and performed with the community theater club. I even attended the same summer drama camp that Tina Fey was a part of (although not at the same time, she was just a few years ahead of me)! I continued to act all the way till my junior year in HS. However, I never joined my HS theater club, because the politics were awful and I decided I didn’t need to be a part of that group, I had my own community theater group that I had been working with for years. Between my junior and senior year, all my dreams died…I had surgery on my tonsils, and I couldn’t hold a note to save my life after that.  So I never had to make the hard decisions about taking chances in NYC – my theater dreams were over. I did do some more dance, and continued doing DJ/voice work in college.

I wanted to add some actual photos of my life experiences but apparently these years are not that accessible in my current situation. So here are a select few I was able to dig up.

 

 

 

Author Bio: Lauren Gibaldi

Lauren Gibaldi is a public librarian who’s been, among other things, a magazine editor, high school English teacher, bookseller, and circus aerialist (seriously). She has a BA in Literature and Master’s in Library and Information Studies. She lives in Orlando, Florida with her husband and daughter. Her books include THE NIGHT WE SAID YES, AUTOFOCUS, and the forthcoming THIS TINY PERFECT WORLD.

Links:

Website  **  Goodreads  **  Twitter  **  Facebook  **  Tumblr

 

Giveaway:

Tour-Wide Giveaway of a finished copy of This Tiny Perfect World by Lauren Gibaldi – Open US only, 2/26-3/13/18 – enter rafflecopter.

Exclusive Blog Stop Giveaway – Swag pack – US only closes 3/13/18 (must hear back in 48 hours) – Leave a meaningful comment on this blog.

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