Author: Lisi Harrison
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!
Today's Tiffany day on my blog. I'm reviewing two novels with the name 'Tiffany' in the title. The first of these is named after the 1950s Truman Capote novella titled: Breakfast at Tiffany's This is why I fell in love with the title of this novel even though it's the kind of novel I'd normally avoid like the plague. It was on close-out, so I thought, "What the hell? Let's take it for a spin and see how badly it drives!"
I was rather surprised, then to discover that I didn't immediately hate it, even as I couldn't figure out if this was:
- A sly parody of Valley-Girl-style, spoiled-rotten clique kids
- A truly cynical method of defrauding teens of their discretionary-spending allowance OR
- A morality tale about the crippling effect of chronic self-absorption.
But then, who reads this stuff, seriously? And why?! You can hardly blame an author if people voluntarily cough-up money to read what she writes. The problem for me was that in the end, the novel didn't do anything for me. It seemed completely content to do nothing more than extol the vacuous lives of thoroughly misguided kids who had no ambition, and who are obsessed with cliques and clothes, and have no mind for anything else. It was truly sad how blind these children were to reality.
There were parts I hated, such as the purposeful misspelling of words ("nawt" for "not" for example) and stretching out the 'a' in any word which begun with it, such as aah-dorable (which it wasn't). The endless repetition of "Ehmagosh" and "Whatevs", and even worse, the designer names which were trotted out (pretty much every other page) in tandem with every single item of clothing that was mentioned. In short it quickly became nauseating and the saddest thing of all was that nothing had changed by the end of the novel. The kids hadn't grown, and they had learned diddly-squat. I cannot recommend this.
