Author: Frances O'Roark Dowell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
Janie Gorman is a bit of a loser. She's the kind of person who tends to complain about how bad her life is without realizing that the problems of which she complains so fluently (some might say flatulently) are within her own grasp to fix. Janie lives on a farm. The idea of moving there was originally hers, but she's come to regret it. She lives out of town, and now she's moved up to high school she hardly gets chance to see her friends from middle school. The only one she still sees with any regularity is Sarah, who is a bit shallow at best, and Janie is starting to have doubts about how sturdy that friendship is.
Janie is a loner, who tends to end up with farm smells on her, which repel other kids. She could of course get up earlier so that she can complete her farm chores, then shower and get dressed for school, but she's too dumb to register that solution as both practical and within her grasp. She is on 'B' lunch, whereas her middle school friends are all on 'A' lunch, and she's too dumb to engineer meetings with them, so she goes to sit in the library alone rather than sit in the cafeteria alone. In art class, she sits between two people who are constantly flirting, yet she's too dumb to switch places with one of them.
Her salvation from dumbness comes, oddly enough, via Sarah, when the latter promotes herself as a potential bass player for the after school 'jam band'. Sarah's only interest is in Jeremy, the 'dreamy' guitar player, but when Sarah realizes that bass guitars actually have size and weight, she chickens out. Janie, meanwhile, who had been swept along under the pretence that she can sing, tries the bass, and discovers that it resonates with her in more than one way, so she starts learning to play it.
Slowly, Janie starts to see that she has a life, and the nicknames she has garnered for herself, Farm Girl, Haystack Hair, Goat Girl, and even Skunk Girl after the incident with the goat poop, drop away, as did my interest in this novel. Janie was far too much of a loser and far too limp and slow to get a grip that I could not get with her at all. She really was a skunk girl after all and it's true: she's not even close to normal unless you equate 'normal' with poor YA protagonists.
