Author: Sara Zarr & Tara Altebrando
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY
I can see why the publishers wouldn’t want a reviewer like me to get hold of a novel like this. We're treated in much the same way as character Elizabeth was by boyfriend Alex: betrayed, cheated on and like Elizabeth, screwed!
Unsurprisingly, given that it’s written by two people, this is a bit like an epistolary novel with alternating chapters taken up (in first person PoV I'm sorry to say) by two girls who are newly graduated from high-school, and planning upon attending Berkley University in San Francisco. How autobiographical it is, is unknown! There begins an exchange of emails between them since they’re destined to be room mates, but their respective chapters (fortunately for me!) do not consist solely of emails.
For one of them (Lauren), the move to university is like staying home (even though she's going to be in the dorms). because she will be only 25 miles away from where she grew up. For the other (Elizabeth - whose dad is gay, BTW), it’s a cross-continental escape from her rather so-so life in New Jersey. One of them wants to pursue something in science (Lauren), the other in landscaping (Elizabeth, the one with the gay dad). Kudos to the authors for stepping outside the standard comfort zone on that one. One of the girls is relatively well-off (gay-dad Elizabeth), the other is relatively poor and scraping by (Lauren). One of them is an only child (Elizabeth), the other from a large family (Lauren). One is living with a single parent (Elizabeth - the other absentee parent is gay, he's her dad), the other not (Lauren). In short, they’re artificially set-up to be as different as possible and thereby generate maximum conflict potential. Can anyone say cliché?! This is about as staged and artificial as you can get. I did mention that Elizabeth's dad is gay, didn't I?
The one in San Fran, from the large family (Lauren), understandably wanted her own dorm, but as a first year she was obviously deluding herself - yet later, the impossible to come-by single dorm is magically available. Conflict much? Lauren sees an academic email notifying her of the fact that she's to share with another girl at about the same time as she sees an overly perky email from the very girl with whom she'll be sharing. The university introduced them early so they could get to know each other a bit before they find themselves living together. Lauren replies rather tersely, and a slightly precarious and somewhat wobbly dynamic between them begins. Slowly it approaches an even keel as they learn to filter out their mood of the moment from the need to work towards a solid footing for their next year together.
This novel was first published in very late 2013, not in 2003 so it's interesting that the writing style tells us far more about the age, perspective, and higher education experiences of the authors of this novel (Sara & Tara) than it ever does about the purported teen authors (Elizabeth and Lauren). I found that quite revealing about how uninventive the authors are.
Elizabeth Logan is nicknamed EB. Why? No explanation. Lauren thinks of her as Ebb - like the initials for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I don't know if Ebb, like in ebb and flow, or the poet is meant to convey anything. I suspect not, which is probably a good thing. I mean, who would want to extol a writer who named her son Pen?! Whatever name she goes by, Elizabeth seems to be the shallowest of shallow. At one point she expresses dismay about how she ever got together with her boyfriend and the only two issues she raises then are that he liked two sitcoms which she did not, and he always wore a baseball cap. Honestly? That was it? How pathetic can you get? Yeah, she also has an issue where he wants sex and she doesn’t, but which woman doesn't have that issue? Which guy doesn’t?!
Lauren and Elizabeth seem to comport themselves more like fourteen-year-olds than eighteen, with their "girlish" boy talk about kissing and "doing it". Not that either of them is doing it at that point. Elizabeth considers herself to be a "slut" for kissing a guy more than once for goodness sakes - and she's the one who thinks her mother needs a therapist? Are you kidding me? I sincerely hope our eighteen-year-old women aren’t like these two, especially not those who are educated well-enough to be university-bound.
The behavior of these two young too-young girls is especially weird given that they're quite literally strangers who know next-to-nothing about each other. Their becoming "insta-friends" has a solid ring of falsehood about it which really strains credibility and suspension of disbelief. Indeed, false as it is, the love affair between the two of them has far more going for it than does either one's trashy YA trope affair with a boy. Another weird thing is that neither of them is showing any anticipation or excitement about the fact that a whole new life is opening up for them chock-full of great experiences, new people, and a wonderful education where they will get to choose the things they study. Seriously, what woman worth knowing is that blinkered in her outlook?
Instead of reveling in this upcoming adventure, as any self-respecting teen ought to be (realistically speaking), they're maudlin and whiny about their supposedly sad lives, obsessing over boys for whom they've had thoroughly insufficient time to develop real feelings (Elizabeth much less so than Lauren) and they're also wallowing in meaningless trivia. This really undermines any potential power this novel might have had.
Another weird thing (among many!) is their emailing and texting practices. They behave like fourteen-year-olds when it comes to their behavior vis-à-vis boys, but they appear excessively mature in their emailing style: they use no abbreviations or texting-type shortcuts. How weird is that? Despite some emails coming from Lauren and others from Elizabeth (e-Lizabeth and i-Lauren?! LoL), their emails are completely interchangeable in style. The same author could have written them all (and maybe she did!). They even employ the same style, using capitalization for emphasis instead of italicizing the words or at least putting an _underscore_ before and aft, or an *asterisk*. When Elizabeth mentions to Lauren that her father wrote her a letter (as opposed to an email) when he left, she talks about it like she's forty years old and this happened thirty years ago, when in fact it happened roughly a decade ago. Excuse me but there were emails throughout both their lives; it’s not like either of them grew up in an era where the primary means of written communication was snail-mail. But maybe the authors did.
I guess I should say a word or two about their respective dating situations (not the authors, the characters!). Lauren's dating situation is, well, none. She's apparently never had a real date (at eighteen! In San Francisco! If you can believe that!). Her tedious whine is that she never has time for anything, which means she's lying to herself, and her problem isn’t lack of time, but really lousy time-management skills (which she needs to address with diligence before she ever enters serious academia). She's on summer vacation for goodness sakes! Yes, she has two jobs, but from her narrative, both of these combined occupy minimal time.
The one guy she hangs out with (though only at work to begin with) is named Keyon, and he's the black son of her black employer at the deli where she works lunch times. Oh, and he's black. She thinks he's kinda hot (and black), but nothing happens until she has her own mini-pity-party at a larger party she attends, and he's there at her side. Did I mention he's black? His comforting her leads to a kiss and suddenly it’s instadore (and he's black). Not insta-love, but instadore (or more likely, instafatuation?), since it cannot be love, not even remotely, not even if he's black. I did mention that he's black, right? Why YA authors, especially female YA authors cannot ever seem to convey this important distinction (love v. infatuation) to their young and potentially impressionable readership is as much an abuse of said readership as it is a mystery to discerning readers. They seem to have no problem telling a story in black and white....
Elizabeth has been dating Alex for six months, but is going off him. He's pressuring her for sex which she doesn’t want to give not even after six months because he likes two sitcoms that she hates and he wears a baseball cap. There can be no doubt that these are good, solid, valid reasons for denying nookie are the only ones a modern girl needs. Yet she's contemplating putting out for a guy she just met and knows nothing about, and she wants to nookie his noodle for no other reason than that he replaced her tank-top strap when it fell down her arm. Seriously? Does she not have enough smarts to graspeth that short-term chivalry to get some long-term bootie is ye oldest trick in ye book? The most dangerous guys are the ones who put their dates/wives on a pedestal whilst simultaneously abusing them either physically or mentally. Elizabeth met Mark through her part time landscaping job, although there was much more ladscaping than landscaping going on that day. And of course, Mark is also instafatuation.
Once I'd made up my mind about this novel, I checked out some other reviews to see if I'd missed something important (no, I hadn't!), and I noted that some reviewers have speculated over which author wrote which character, and whether they each went into character and wrote the novel as their character alter ego. I see no point in such speculation even though there are things we can learn from the author bios. Zarr was raised in San Fran, and Altebrando lives in NYC, so it’s tempting to think they each wrote the character who was closest to home, but we also read that Zarr moved to Salt Lake City, home of the bizarre Mormon religion, so it’s tempting to think she may have written the sexually-troubled Elizabeth with the gay dad (I did mention he was gay, right?). See what I mean?! No point in speculation. I suspect that they each wrote parts of both characters.
I found it amusing that Elizabeth doesn’t dig into Lauren's online presence because she considers looking at someone's Facebook page is the equivalent of stalking! Not that Lauren has an online presence, but her best friend does. That's how sad Elizabeth is. The saddest thing about Lauren's family is that they're apparently too ignorant (or just too stupid) to get vaccinated against the flu. People who fail to vaccinate their kids are guilty of child abuse, in my opinion. I also find it particularly odd that this flu strikes in July, but hell, it's that kind of a novel.
The saddest thing about Elizabeth's relationship with Mark is that one of the highlights they think they should pack into their limited time together is to have a fight! I am not making this up. Their list is so childish as to be nauseating. Or maybe the saddest thing about her is that she looks up Lauren's friend Zoe on Facebook and discovers that Zoe is white so she assumes Lauren is, too (and her boyfriend is black. Did I mention that yet?). Seriously, I do not get the obsession these authors have with color and sexual orientation in this novel - it’s not like variation in skin is completely natural or anything... (and yes, Caucasians are a minority, so deal with it!), or that being gay is merely one point on the sliding scale from totally feminine to totally masculine or anything! Zarr and Altebrando have to highlight it in - yes! - color, underline it, and spell it out in block caps with a snazzy font. Why? Are they making up for the sins of their own youth? Who knows?
Lauren thinks black babies are cuter than white babies. I don’t know if that assertion is more condescending than racist or the other way around, but it seems revealing that Lauren Cole is the girl whom the authors have dating the black guy. Really?! C'mon, babies are cute, period (except when it comes to crying, spitting-up, and diapers, of course, then they're universally nasty). I don’t see how you can categorize babies by color, like they're socks or something, but Sara and Tara evidently have no problem with that method.
The ending of the novel was perfect, and not just because it brought this sorry attempt at drama to a close. It was just horrible that everything leading up to that ending was so below par. It would seem obvious from that ending that Zarr and Altebrando are planning on a sequel to this, but I will not be on-board for any such novel, or any subsequent milking of this honestly juvenile effort. This novel is WARTY!
