Rating: WARTY!
This book went on for half its length offering nothing more than an extended pity party for main character: thirteen-year-old disaffected misfit Cassie Stephens. Then it changed and went on for the other half with an even bigger pity party for Cassie Stephens. This reads like a first draft of a Judy Blume novel before she tore it up and burned it with a large quantity of gasoline, before crushing the ashes to powder and then burying them too deeply even for utility companies to unearth them accidentally.
This might have been bearable had it not been first person PoV, which is worst person PoV, especially when the character is so completely self-absorbed in wallowing in hypochondria-inspired whining. Cassie was not likeable at all. Indeed, check that name. She has a seventeen year old sister. A seventeen year old sister who still goes by Stephie. Yes, Stephie Stephens. The author has infantilized them irreparably, so it's hardly surprising we get a lousy novel.
There was some humor and some engrossing moments, but just when it looked like the author might be getting over herself and starting to tell us an interesting story - Cassie's run for class president - along comes new boy in school, who's a hottie, and inexplicably zeroes in on Cassie as his main squeeze. This is one in a long line of school clichés in which the author indulges herself. There's the perky, devoted best friend, the mean clique, the wonderful teacher, the mean teacher, the embarrassing incident, the rough home life, and finally the guy who takes your sorry-assed weak girl’s life and turns it around because you’re too much of a weak and sorry-assed girl to do it yourself. Pul-eaze!
Curiously we get a brief explanation for why the one teacher is mean, but we get no explanation at all for why Cassie's family is as dysfunctional as you can get and still maintain a place in the family category. Her mom and dad are at each other's throats all the time, her older sister is downright mean to her, her younger brother, despite all this, is perky and positive, and charming, and not remotely affected by his disintegrating family. And he's only seven. Yeah, right.
Cassie's mom seems not to be mean at all. On the contrary, she's very supportive of Cassie, but Cassie is mean to her, rejecting her every overture, demeaning her every action, rejecting her support and friendship, and internally bad-mouthing her quite literally all the time. There is no reason for this behavior and none is offered. She has a better opinion of her dad, despite his absenteeism and self-absorption, and his routinely wandering off to play golf instead of spending time with his family.
In true trope fashion, the new boy in school this year zeroes in on Cassie for no apparent reason, and becomes her instant soul-mate, actively seeking her company, and asking her out to a movie. By the half-way point I was tired of listening to Cassie, and I certainly did not like her. I found the novel to be making no sense at all. Fortunately it was short enough that I decided to try and read it all the way through, to see if the suggestion of an improvement (as Cassie starts to run for class president) actually would turn out to be a real improvement, or if the new boy's clichéd attraction to and salvation of our main character would drag the whole story right back down into trope trash. That admittedly faint hope was dashed cruelly on the relentless rocks of Cassie non-stop whining.
Cassandra (for that simply has to be this moaning Minnie’s name) wins the school election as she loses her family through the inevitable divorce and the story suddenly stops. I can’t recommend this, not even a little bit. It's horrible. Had it been submitted to a publisher now, it would have been run out of town on a vuvuzela.
