Rating: WARTY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Errata:“never-a-hair-outof-place” is missing a hyphen.
"555 feet 51/8” five and one eighth looks like 51 eights!
“Mom spears a chunk of kung pao chicken” followed by, only one page later, “They’re both eating mu shu chicken with chopsticks”
My shu pork is Northern Chinese dish. Kung Pao chicken is a Sichuan dish from southern central China! Not really the same thing.
This book felt like it wasn't sure where to go and so took the safest, most predictable path from start to finish. It felt like a heavy-handed lesson on the Mount Rushmore presidents, but the face it offered was just as cold and stony as that edifice to presidents who were certainly not the best examples of humanity we could have chiseled into a rock face.
Amanda Adams (yes, that's her name) decides that she wants to run for class president, all without discussing it with her best friend who she expects to run as her VP; then she irrationally gets miffed when she discovers that her best friend is also running for the same office. Once again the book description was apparently written by someone who seems to have little clue what's going on in the book and is just trying to make it sound sensational, which it really isn't. We're told that "Politics is in her DNA" but she clearly does not have any such DNA, and she makes one gaff after another in a poorly-conceived campaign despite having grown up with a Congress person as a mom and a political strategist as a dad. Nor do we ever get any sense that Amanda has a real clue what she's doing. Quite the opposite.
All of this really undermines her credentials and make me wonder why she was running at all. She seemed to have no motivation or plan. The book might have been more engaging had Amanda been a rebel who was, for example, determinedly resisting her parents' efforts to push her into running for this office, but finds herself motivated to do it anyway because of some cause which stirs her. This book wasn't written for me, but it didn't seem like it would appeal very much even to its target audience as it stands. It was obvious from the start which running mate Amanda would end up with, but the real problem with it was that she'd had this idea of running for president for some time but had given zero thought to lining-up her running mate. And this is the girl who has politics in her DNA? Na-uh! Not even close.
We got an Amanda who ran into trouble getting the support of her soccer team because they all irrationally felt that she'd spend all her time campaigning and neglect soccer games and practice, but we're given no reason why they would think that of her. Didn't they know her better than that? It's no spoiler to reveal that her team loses an important game, because it's that kind of a color-by-numbers novel.
What's shameful is the approach to the game, treating it like it was a major 'take no prisoners and slaughter the enemy' battle in an ongoing war rather than with any kind of sportsmanship. I found these rallying cries offensive. Clearly they were taking their cue from the USWNT in the last soccer World Cup when, in their first game, they were lording it over a clearly inferior team instead of being professional about their scoring bonanza. Amanda is given the baseless perspective of a goalkeeper who thinks she and only she is entirely and solely responsible for keeping the ball out of the goal. I guess her team has no players on defense, with every other member of the team is playing on the forward line. It was entirely unrealistic and unbelievable.
Now you can argue that this girl is in seventh grade and may well think like she does because of that, but Amanda is supposed to be the hero of the story with politics in her DNA, and who takes life lessons from the Mount Rushmore community. The problem is that she never seems to learn anything from these mini-bios of the presidents that she bores the reader with, and the story becomes nothing more than jingoism, repeating the tedious and clichéd mythology without actually examining it at all.
Rather than break new ground and find presidents who led exemplary lives which would merit examination and emulation, the author took the road most trampled and trotted out Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts. The book was just starting in on the womanizing John Kennedy when I quit.
Why take this trite and easy route? Why not dig a little and find presidents who were not land cheats, as Washington was; not slave abusers, as Jefferson was; not overseeing one of the biggest land-grabs from the Navajos and Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico as Lincoln did; not supporting waterboarding as Teddy Roosevelt did, or dishonorably discharging African American men of the 25th infantry Battalion (the Buffalo Soldiers) on unfounded charges as he did; and finally, not sanctioning the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War Two as Franklin Roosevelt did.
There have been 45 presidents in the US, and while the present one is a dangerous, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and scientifically ignorant clown, not all of them have been like that. Some - like Clinton and Kennedy - have been reprehensible womanizers, but others, like Obama, have been a beacon. Could the author not have found some like that? Apparently not.
I can't commend a book like this at all.
