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Title: Looking for Alibrandi
Author: Melina Marchetta
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Melina Marchetta is the bomb.

Summary: 17-year-old Josephine Alibrandi is forever in trouble with the nuns at her Catholic school, her grandmother, and her mother. So maybe it’s a good thing her biological father has never wanted to meet her.

Review: I thought it might be good to start with a note I wrote to this book:

Dear Book by One of My Favorite Authors,

I wanted to love you. I wanted to sing your praises like I have for your sisters. But I’m not sure we’re a good fit.

Don’t get me wrong—I enjoyed our time together. It’s just that I probably won’t be calling you again.

Can we still be friends? Best,
Kelly

I loved parts of this book, but I didn’t fall in love with it on the whole. In this book as in Marchetta’s others, you can’t beat the romance story lines and the wit.

In general, though, I felt like this book lacked the subtlety that made my heart go pitter-patter while reading Marchetta’s two later novels. A lot of chapters seemed to end with a “moral,” and that wore on me. In addition, some of the dialogue came across as forced. At one point, Josephine apologizes to her mom, and I just couldn’t picture it.

Still, if you are a Marchetta fan—and I wholeheartedly am—you should read this, her first novel. It may not live up to the bar set by her other two novels, but it’s a good read nonetheless. Here, Josephine is sitting on stage at an inter-school event, preparing to deliver a speech:

Seated on my other side was Jacob Coote from Cook High.

Cook High is a public school in the city area. Because it’s the closest school to us, we don’t get on well with them. We think they’re better than them. They think we’re the biggest dags in the world.

When we were young, they would throw things out of their bus windows at us, and in Year 10, on the last day of school, Jacob Coote and about ten of his friends, male and female, blocked both entrances of a lane we cut through to get to our bus stop. Twelve of us were bombarded with eggs and rotten fruit and vegetables. Everyone said that one day we would look back on the occasion and laugh.

Very unlikely.

“What are you going to talk about?” he whispered in my ear.

I moved away, hoping nobody had seen him speaking to me. My friends think he’s gorgeous. His hair is brown, shoulder length, not cut into any particular style, and his eyes are green and they always seem to be laughing at you.

He grinned, and by the way his lips were twitching he looked like he was trying to control a laugh. I knew he recognized me from the lane.

“Didn’t I once squash two eggs against your glasses?” he asked.

“I’m flattered you remember. I tripped over a rubbish can, you know, and cut my hand on some broken glass.”

“Oh, come on. We were suspended for that. We didn’t go to school for six weeks.”

“Very funny. We had six weeks’ holiday after that.”

Your Turn: Have you ever read a book from one of your most favorite authors and not loved it?

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