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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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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Saving Francesca—My rating: 4/5
• Tomorrow, When The War Began
• Queen Kat, Carmel & St Jude Get A Life
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: Outwitting Writer’s Block: And Other Problems of the Pen
Author: Jenna Glatzer
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: I bought this book before my book buying ban went into effect, and I’m trying to make progress on the small physical TBR list that is my bookshelf. (In sharp contrast to my virtual TBR list, which is just plain overwhelming.)

Summary: Advice from a screenwriter and playwright on what to do when you find yourself staring at the dreaded blank page.

Review: This book is a good collection of practical ideas for when your writing life seems to be stuck in park. A lot of the tips you’ve probably heard before, but it’s nice to have them handy in one place.

I appreciated how the author included lots of quotes and advice from other authors on how they cope with a blank page. It’s also chock full of writing prompts, which always help to get your fingers out of the no-fly zone. For example:

Write about a secret you accidentally didn’t keep.

The humor was a little on the goofy side, which I didn’t exactly love. Sometimes it felt like the lines were delivered with a wink and a nudge. Still, a few lines got a chuckle out of me.

I’ll leave you with one of the tips I liked. It’s from the section about how to carve out writing time when you have a family who can’t seem to live without you for more than 5 minutes at a time:

If you have an office in your home, find something to hang from the doorknob, such as a red scrunchie or a do-not-disturb doorknob hanger, to signify that you are inside and working.

Your Turn: What do you do when you can’t seem to get the words out of your head and onto the page?

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Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

Did You Like This Book? Try:

• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days—My rating: 3.5/5
• Writing Down the Bones
• On Writing Well
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things
Author: Carolyn Mackler
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: One blogger I follow, Jessica, loved this book, while another, Emily, didn’t think it was all that great. I wanted to see where I’d fall.

Summary: 15-year-old Virginia is fat. Her mother judges her, her father judges her, and everyone at her Manhattan private school judges her. Except for a boy named Froggy.

Review: Virginia is a girl whose spunk inspires you to root for her. The story interested me enough to keep reading, but in the end I didn’t love the book.

This is another case where a character’s young voice wasn’t my thing. I’m considering going back to plot all my book ratings against the main character’s age to see if I find a trend. Any excuse for another spreadsheet!

I also want to try another book by this author—one with an older protagonist—and see if I connect with it better. Any suggestions?

Moving onto my writerly education, here are some lessons reinforced while reading this book:

• Show don’t tell—The show/tell see-saw felt a little lopsided. Poor Show got stuck at the top dangling her legs.
• Tone down the drama—The ending tended toward melodrama. Lots of crying. Sometimes, less is more.
• Watch for adult sayings—For as young as the voice felt, there were a few times when I felt like the author’s adult sensibilities leaked through to the main character, such as in the quote below.

I feel awful that I stormed out of her office last week. I know she only wanted to help me, but I guess it struck a raw nerve. As they say, the truth is always the hardest thing to hear.

That last sentence sounded odd to me coming from a 15-year-old.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• Fat Kid Rules the World
• Speak—My rating: 5/5
• Looking for Alaska—My rating: 5/5
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: Twenty Boy Summer
Author: Sarah Ockler
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: The cover and the title made it look like a light read, which I was in the mood for after a string of not-light books.

Summary: Anna is getting what she’s always wanted—a summer vacation at the beach with her best friend Frankie. Frankie comes up with a game to find summer romance by meeting a new guy every day, and she convinces Anna to play too. But Frankie doesn’t know that Anna already met the guy she wants—Frankie’s older brother Matt, whom Anna can’t let go.

Review: This is what I get for not checking any reviews of this book or even the jacket blurb before I started reading it. Because it’s not exactly a light romance, like I had expected.

But it turns out that fact is what I like best about the book. As I read, my throat was thick with Anna’s grief for Matt and the guilt she felt for wanting to move on—and even worse, for actually moving on.

The ending tended toward melodrama in parts, but overall this one was a good read.

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• The Chosen One
• Prada and Prejudice
• Breathing
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing

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Title: The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them and The Treasure Map of Boys: Noel, Jackson, Finn, Hutch, Gideon–and me, Ruby Oliver
Author: E. Lockhart
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: The Boyfriend List was a good read, so I wanted to finish out the series.

Summary: Ruby Oliver just started her junior year, but she still doesn’t have much to speak of in the way of friends—and definitely no boyfriend. Not only that, but the one boy she wants to move into the BF column? Roo’s former girlfriend who’s slowly warming back up to a friendship with her happens to have a crush on that same boy.

Review: The rest of this series made for quick, fun reads. The two issues I had with The Boyfriend List—too many footnotes and a confusing story timeline—did not crop up in these two books.

Just pure, clean fun. Well, except for the flirty bits and also the kissing.

This exchange between Roo and her crush Noel made me smile. Someone at school called Roo a slut, and she’s telling Noel about it over an afterschool pizza.

“I wish I’d responded to the slut thing, though.”

“What is there to say?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ‘I prefer tart’?”

“Tart is nice. It’s a pastry.”

“Maybe I could reclaim the word slut,” I said. “Like gay people have reclaimed the word queer, so it’s not a whatever.”

“Epithet.”

“Yeah. I could run around with signs. ‘Slutty and Proud!’”

“Sluts of America Unite!”

“Exactly.” I took a sip of my pop.

“Your mom could wear a T-shirt: ‘I’m proud of my slutty kid.’” Noel fished around in his backpack for a pen. “Here, I’ll design you a slut logo.” He found a ballpoint and started to draw on a piece of notebook paper. A sketch of a woman wearing a superhero cape, glasses like mine and a strange pointy bra.

“I don’t think I ever told you that none of the stuff people say about me is true,” I blurted out.

“About the boyfriend list?”

“I was never with all those guys.”

Noel shook his head. “I wouldn’t care if you were.”

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Did You Like This Book? Try:

• The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things
• An Abundance of Katherines—My rating: 4/5
• Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything
• More Recommendations from LibraryThing