Book Review: Janes in Love, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

 Photo by D Sharon Pruitt

This book is the second in a series, please read my review of The Plain Janes.

Janes in Love picks up where The Plain Janes left off. It's Valentine's Day and the Main Jane, Jane Buckles, wants a date for the Ides of March ball, but is torn between two boys. One of them she likes and knows, however, he doesn't seem to be attracted to her as much as the newcomer is. But then he is stuck doing community service because of her! It's a difficult situation, but she has a lot to distract her - the Janes are running out of money, Theatre Jane has fallen for an actor and Polly Jane has a boyfriend.

Things get worse when most of the Janes are caught by Officer Sanchez putting one of their public art pieces together, and after another terrorist attack, Main Jane's mother stops leaving the house. It also becomes clear that Main Jane has a secret admirer - is it one of the boys she can't decide between, or someone else? Main Jane is now sending letters to Poland for Miroslaw, and he inspires her to apply for a grant for P.L.A.I.N. to create a community art garden. Could this save the Janes?

I didn't like this book as much as I did The Plain Janes. The characters didn't really develop any more, which was disappointing, and I would have liked to see more public art and less worrying about love lives. The cover and title slightly annoyed me, they made this title very much more a 'girl' book whereas I thought the first book would appeal to boys as well. However, it was an entertaining read and because it is a short, mini-sized graphic novel, it took 40 minutes maximum for me to get through. It is definitely worth reading if you enjoyed The Plain Jane, and you need to read the first book in order to understand and appreciate this sequel. It was nice to spend time with the Janes again and it was easier to get into the plot of this one knowing the background information already. There was also a great romantic twist at the end! It is a shame that the Minx imprint was cancelled and that the sequels the writer and artist had planned are unlikely to surface.

You can see some pages from Janes In Love (without text, so no spoilers) and from the cancelled third instalment in the series, Janes Go Summer here at the readergirlz blog.

Don't you just love it when

you have a book by an author you love so you know you'll love the book and then when you read the book you love it and keep stopping to say silly things like 'Oh my god I love this book!' or 'Author-name you are a genius'. I love it. You don't say? Yeah. I say.

Last time I had this experience I was reading The Boy Book by E. Lockhart, which obviously I was going to love as I adored The Boyfriend List. I am having it again with Nobody's Girl by Sarra Manning. I swear she just keeps getting better and better! Every new book is just so much more detailed and powerful than the ones before, although of course those still remain brilliant and stand up to being re-read afterwards. I'm only on chapter five, but I can recognise improvement right from the start.

I always read with my 'writing hat' on. Some writers complain that learning the craft of writing can spoil the pleasure of reading unless you make a deliberate effort not to think like a writer whilst you're reading just for fun. This has not been my experience so far. Some advocate reading each book twice, once as a 'reader', and once as a 'writer', but my critical faculties are always on and usually at maximum power when I'm reading a book. I think this at least partly comes from having studied cultural theory, I always say that beginning to learn theory was like discovering that I live in the Matrix. I look at everything through that lens I developed as an undergraduate.

Yes, it involves thinking a lot. Yes, I can no longer bring myself to watch crap films in which a beautiful woman falls in love with some stupid man after various tedious slapstick things have happened. But I get to experience a added level of pleasure when I read or watch something that has been done right. I also admire nice plot twists, detailed characterisation, great dialogue - oh, how I love dialogue! I see how they did that, and I love it! I get especially excited when one of the things I particularly love to see in teen fiction turns up at the start of a book, because there is almost no way that it can fail to be good with one of these things in it. I first made up this list when talking to one of my postgraduate tutors about why I love teen fiction, and I included it in the commentary for my MA portfolio. I've added to it since, so now along with such things as 'intelligent, critical narrators', and 'teenagers with slightly-more-glamourous-than-mine lives', I have listed 'quirky families' and 'characters with hobbies'. One day I'll have to make a post about this list.

But today I am going to type up some reviews for Body Image and Self Perception Month, and then carry on with Nobody's Girl. I am so excited! When I have read Nobody's Girl I will be well prepared for the Chicklish birthday event having read every book by Sarra Manning and Simmone Howell and one of Luisa Plaja's. Unfortunately my local library does not have Della Says: OMG! by Keris Stainton and I won't have a chance to get it before Monday, but still, this is amazing, as most of the time when I go to see authors speak I haven't actually read any of their books!

I haven't posted anything that wasn't strictly a review on this blog for ages. How did I do?

Book Review: Life on the Refrigerator Door, by Alice Kuipers

A whole story told through notes left on a refrigerator door? Sounds difficult to do right, if right is even possible, doesn't it? Before reading this I was very sceptical about the idea. I expected this book to be high on the novelty value and sentimentality, and when I picked it up in the library I did so because I thought the style would be interesting, if not the content.

It's the story of the relationship between a mother and daughter before, during, and after the mother becomes seriously ill - I won't go into more detail or I might spoil it. Surprisingly, this book doesn't come across as gimmicky. It is an honest, and ultimately very sad (I cried! My sister cried too!) story elegantly told through the notes the mother and daughter leave each other. Although they only communicate with each other and us the readers through notes, I still got a real sense of the characters. However, the ending feels a bit too abrupt, it's not as well paced as the rest of the book and I would have liked it to go on longer although the author does her best to draw it to a neat conclusion.

I did wonder if it would have been just as effective or more so if told in a more conventional style. On the one hand, you don't really need to know any more about the characters for the story to work and to have its emotional impact, but on the other, there's some stuff you just have to guess at, and sometimes the notes did seem a little unrealistic.

The biggest drawback of this book, in my opinion, not a criticism, but a drawback - is that it is very quick to read. It took me 45 minutes. It's a good book to have in libraries, and possibly to encourage reluctant readers, but I imagine the sparseness of the text, for lack of a better description, puts off some potential readers seeing it in a shop. If I'd seen it in a shop before the library, I wouldn't have considered buying it. It does a lot in those 45 minutes, I remember the story in surprising detail, but I'm sure most readers that pick up Life on the Refrigerator Door see that it will be a quick read straight away, and that must put them off 'investing' in it.

Book Review: Guitar Girl, by Sarra Manning

Picture by leochi

Molly Montgomery is being sued for 5 million pounds by her former record company, and she's suing them back, despite not being even 20 years old yet. Her lawyer, confident they will win, asks her to write down the whole story of how she went from uncool teenager to front woman of The Hormones, so that he can build a case. This account makes up the bulk of this book.

It's not the most original story - teenage fiction as a genre is filled with fantasies about ordinary teenagers who becomes celebrities - but it is unusually realistic. Molly forms the band with her best friends Jane and Tara, in the hope it would make them a little cooler, writing songs about Hello Kitty and magic markers, but it is soon hijacked by Dean and T, two boys who worm their way into the band by insulting them and promising that they could make the group sound better. Molly hates Dean at first but starts to fall for him as they are signed up by a record company and taken around the world to tour. But their manipulative manager doesn't want them to date, and soon he starts to make other demands too, and things go from bad to worse as Molly's virginity becomes hot gossip and Jane tries to live the rockstar stereotype.

I have enjoyed all of Sarra Manning's books, but Guitar Girl is not one of my favourites - my favourites being Let's Get Lost, and Diary Of A Crush 2: Kiss And Make Up, and Fashionistas: Irina. The plot of Guitar Girl was a bit predictable compared to the other stories, and I don't think Dean makes an alluring enough romantic interest. What can I say? He's not Dylan, and I'll always love Dylan the best, although Noel from the Ruby Oliver series is giving him a run for his money these days. Dylan is all mixed up with nostalgia as I read the Diary of a Crush series in J-17 as an actual teenager, and was thereby hooked on art boys for life. But I think even if I was fourteen right now Dylan would beat Dean in the Sarra Manning Toxic Boy Showdown, although the contest is kind of rigged as Dylan gets three books and is essentially nicer.

Anyway, back to Guitar Girl. I thought it was more down-to-earth, with more details about the music business, than any other book about teenagers becoming pop stars that I have read. The characterisation is strong, although I wanted to know more about the histories of the various members of the band than the book includes, and Molly makes a believable teenage narrator. I loved the fast pace and thought that it captured the feeling of being a teenager really well. Despite my criticisms, I have read and enjoyed Guitar Girl more than once.

If you read and enjoy this book, you will also want to check out two of Sarra's other books - Let's Get Lost, and Irina from the Fashionistas series, because they feature appearances from characters in Guitar Girl, and you can see what happened next...





Here's my review of Pretty Things, also by Sarra Manning.

Book Review: Diving In, by Kate Cann

Photo by ajari

Every Thursday, Collette goes swimming. She loves the water, the exercise, the way it makes her feel. But most of all she loves watching a boy, whom she calls Achilles, because he has the body of a Greek god. She's too nervous to speak to him - until one week she literally runs into him in the changing rooms. Next time they get talking, and it turns out his real name is Art, short for Arthur, and he likes Coll.

They start going out on dates, and Coll is swept up into Art's world. She can't spend enough time with him. He's got looks, money and confidence, but horrible friends and a messed up family. Coll's friends don't like Art much, and neither does her proudly feminist mother. Coll manages to ignore all the negatives until Art starts to expect too much too fast. Coll has never had sex before and wants to feel completely ready for it, whereas Art has had dozens of meaningless sexual relationships...

I enjoyed reading Diving In. The characterisation is strong, especially when it comes to the main characters' family backgrounds. Coll and Art have very different families and the way their upbringing impacts on their relationship is brought into the story really well. Coll's feelings develop at just the right pace, and there are also some funny moments to lighten the tone when it starts to get issue heavy. The central issues of this novel are teenage relationships and sex, and this book has the potential to help teenage readers in relationships to know when they are ready, and to recognise when they are being pressured into going further than they want to go.
Being an old fogey in my twenties now, I'll admit, I didn't get as much out of Diving In as teenagers could and I did find myself getting a little tired in places as the plot revolves around Coll's relationship with Art so much.

Diving In is the first book in a print trilogy, the first in a quartet if you include Art History, which is partly a retelling of the books from Art's point of view as well as the conclusion to their story. Diving In doesn't really stand on its own, to get the full story you have to read - and should want to- the other books. Art History used to be available to read free on Kate Cann's website, but it's been taken down as Kate is going to add more material to it before it is published! Exciting! Kate Cann writes brilliantly from the point of view teenage boys, I absolutely loved the Hard Cash/Moving trilogy when I read them as a teen. I need to re-read those, but I'm not sure my library still stocks them and I don't like the new pinkified covers!





My review of Leader of the Pack, also by Kate Cann.