Say Yes and Keep Smiling

In this sequel to the quirky and engaging Suck It In and Smile, Ellie has pulled her life back together. After a live-streamed public proposal, she is now engaged to a famous singer, ready to launch her book of wellness tips, and edging into the top three on the YouTube charts. Ellie’s public image of beauty and confidence seems unassailable, yet her social media posts and public persona hide profound insecurities.

Say Yes and Keep Smiling is an entertaining read like Suck It In and Smile, using multiple ways of weaving together Ellie’s story. YouTube lists, first person narrative, Insta posts, FaceBook feeds and text messages reflect the fragmented communication of “influencer” culture. Ellie’s world revolves around comments and “likes”, and her very public life makes her vulnerable.

Most of the people around her reinforce her feelings of inadequacy. Her shallow fiancé, heartthrob singer Sam Vanasse, worries aloud that he would no longer love her if she put on weight. Her followers’ vapid and petty comments seem mostly fawning but include poisonous notes that make her even more fixed on her body image. Her sister and girlfriend mock her fixation on her body, but Ellie is convinced that, if she’s not actively trying to lose weight, she will regain it. A new meal plan or lifestyle will put everything in order. “I hold my destiny in my own hands. One renunciation at a time. I become master of my own desires. I starve myself. I deny myself” (p. 198). Her “Fifteen Days to become Radiant” campaign feeds herself as well as her insatiable followers.

Ellie is a people pleaser, reluctant to confront those who want to manipulate her. Though her social media suggests power-couple bliss, her on-again, off-again engagement with Sam leaves her unsupported. The man she thought cared for her honestly, Dave, meets Ellie for intense encounters and then abandons her to long silences. She ignores suspicions about Mila, her friend-rival, because she yearns to trust someone, and the pressure to be “authentic” pulls her in so many directions she has no idea what she really wants. Her dithering over decisions occasionally makes a reader wish she would grow a backbone, but, without a sense of herself, Ellie finds decisions impossible to make or sustain.

Key to Ellie’s poor self-image are her childhood memories of her Papa, now fatally ill and fading fast. She remembers his constant criticism, the sense that she could never be good enough or thin enough to suit him. Torn by her resentment over his treatment of her as a child, she, nonetheless, remains silent while she cares for him.

When a betrayal blows up her social media world, Ellie finally screws up the courage to be honest. Her relationships with her father, her fiancé, her friends and her followers all twist in a sudden storm of consequences, and Ellie, at last, takes steps to discover who she might truly become.

In Say Yes and Keep Smiling, Laurence Beaudoin-Masse empowers Ellie to finally stop tiptoeing on eggshells to keep her place in the fragile and self-destructive online world. When her public turns on her like seagulls on French fries, Ellie’s decision is a triumph. In the end, Ellie cannot rely on men, on followers, or on mirrors to tell her who she is or wants to be. She must rely on herself.

Vowing to speak to girls like her who “never feel like they’re good enough,” Beaudoin-Masse helps young readers see some of the pressures and falseness in online “content creators”. Say Yes and Keep Smiling, like its predecessor, takes a quirky yet incisive look under the surface of social media creations and encourages readers to do the same.