Author: Kathryn Ormsbee
Publication Date: June 6, 2017 (Simon & Schuster)
Format: Ebook - 384pgs
Rating: ★★★★★
Goodreads Page
Summary:
After a shout-out from one of the Internet’s superstar vloggers, Natasha “Tash” Zelenka finds herself and her obscure, amateur web series, Unhappy Families, thrust into the limelight: She’s gone viral.
Her show is a modern adaptation of Anna Karenina—written by Tash’s literary love Count Lev Nikolayevich “Leo” Tolstoy. Tash is a fan of the forty thousand new subscribers, their gushing tweets, and flashy Tumblr GIFs. Not so much the pressure to deliver the best web series ever.
And when Unhappy Families is nominated for a Golden Tuba award, Tash’s cyber-flirtation with Thom Causer, a fellow award nominee, suddenly has the potential to become something IRL—if she can figure out how to tell said crush that she’s romantic asexual.
Tash wants to enjoy her newfound fame, but will she lose her friends in her rise to the top? What would Tolstoy do?
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In Tash Hearts Tolstoy, our main character Tash is a 17-year-old vlogger who films and produces a mini-series called Unhappy Families with her friends. Unhappy Families is a modern-set adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Tash and her friends experience a slight internet fame after their series is mentioned by a youtuber with a larger following. Along with this Tasha is also dealing with decisions on what college to go to, problems with her sister and parents, confusion about her sexuality, and a budding crush on a fellow youtuber she's only ever talked to through email.
I am so surprised at how much I loved this considering it's contemporary which is just not my genre. I had first heard of Tash Hearts Tolstoy about 6 months or so before it was published and it caught my eye right away for a number of reasons, Firstly, Tolstoy. The last few years I've really been diving more and more into classic literature, but I have had a particular interest in Russian Lit. So when I saw there was a YA novel where the main character reads Tolstoy, a writer whose work I've recently fallen in love with, I knew I would have to read it. Secondly, our main character Tash is a romantic asexual who dates a non-asexual partner and the story depicts what that kind of relationship would look like which is something I was very curious about as it's not a relationship I've seen portrayed or even really talked about much in YA.
I also loved that Tash was such a fully realized character. She had a handful of moments where she made bad decisions or behaved poorly as real people typically do, but throughout the novel, she grew to understand her mistakes and actively made an effort to work on them. She and the other teen characters were accurately portrayed and surprisingly interesting. Two of the other teen characters struggle with a parent having cancer, another two are in a m/m relationship, Tash herself is a vegetarian Buddhist of Czech descent. I just loved all the representation offered in this story, but better than that, it was (IMO) done well.
I gave Tash Hearts Tolstoy 4/5 stars. My only issues with this were that, as lovely as reading about all the characters was, my main interest in this story was the Unhappy Families aspect and sometimes I felt that it dragged on a bit when the story would focus on other parts of Tash's life. And also, I'm really not a fan of stories where romantic feelings are glaringly obvious to everyone but the characters who have the feelings. Overall though, I would definitely recommend this.
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