Work What You Got by Stephanie Perry Moore

Title: Work What You Got
Author: Stephanie Perry Moore
Age Group: Teens
# of Pages: 215
My Rating: 3/5

Hayden Grant is finally in her second year of college. And she is determined to become a member of the Beta Gamma Pi sorority. Thinking that her three best friends are going to join her, she finds out they all changed their minds! No matter, she will continue to pursue her dream.

Signing up to become a Beta, Hayden is looking forward to becoming an influential member with great beliefs and be able to help out within the community. But she never expects the sort of things that she and the other candidates has to go through to become one...

This is my first Christian novel that I have read and as expected, there was a lot of messages thrown in. For example, it is important to follow your heart and know that God is always watching. So on and so forth. I find the whole novel cramped with them and I don't like it at all. It draws away from having an actual story to read. Not only that, but everything flew by so quickly! I like my stories to start off at a decent pace then shoot off when it builds up later on. In the beginning, Hayden meets the gorgeous Creed who was in her classes last year. The second they met, BAM, they were going out already. This made me go, "Wha?" because the author did not give them a chance to get to know each other properly. Character and relationship development is key to a good story. Work What You Got has a lot of slang also. I got used to it pretty quickly but I'm rarely read stories with an African-American protagonist. I don't want to sound racist in any way but I prefer my characters to be white (or at least oriental Asian because there is such a low number of that also). Maybe because about 95% of YA novels, the main character is fair-skinned that I'm used to visualizing them as so instead of dark-skinned.

Overall, Work What You Got is not a bad read but it is definitely not something I would read for pleasure. Too many messages to comprehend and everything was predictable. Someone who is Christian may enjoy it more than I did.

Review ARC copy provided by Book Divas.