Isabella for Real by Margie Palatini (review)

What has Isabella Antonelli hiding in her closet, sneaking out of her house, and jumping from the windows of her elderly aunts’ home, all to avoid her cousin Vincent and local news crews? Vincent’s film project—the one featuring Isabella and her wry observations of their family—has gone viral, exposing her for the garden variety Italian-American New Jerseyite she is, rather than the descendant of royalty her friends at her fancy new prep school believe her to be. The deception began innocently enough: when Isabella’s affected Aunt Kiki, rich from playing a countess on a daytime soap, enrolls her in the sixth grade at Fortier Academy for Young Women, people think “the Countess” is her mother. It’s an amusing premise helped along by the charming smart aleck Isabella and a slew of zany side characters. The exposition, however—a near-constant stream of time stamps and scene/take delineators interspersed with flashbacks and graphic panels—creates more chaos than cohesion, making it a challenge to follow the storyline or infer why Isabella is hightailing it around her neighborhood, avoiding her cousin and the cameras at all costs. While it all rights itself in the end, just as readers grasp what has transpired, an eleventh-hour arrival of Isabella’s long-lost father sets up a sequel—a complete non sequitur given his barely meriting a mention over the course of the novel. Readers who can roll with the random will enjoy their time with Isabella and her wacky family, even if they’re left wondering what, exactly, they just read.