Iris and the Aloha Wedding Adventure by Lynelle Woolley

Title: Iris and the Aloha Wedding Adventure
Author: Lynelle Woolley
Illustrator: Karen Walcott
Publisher: Markelle Media
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is obviously one in a series (it follows Rosie and the Wedding Day Rescue and is succeeded by Starr and the High Seas Wedding Drama), and it’s a great idea to demonstrate cultures outside of your standard US mainstream, by showing wedding customs, although Hawaii really isn't that far out! I’d like to see this series stretch its legs, and hopefully it will. If there's one thing we get way too much of with children's and young adult novels it's that the USA is the only nation on Earth. It’s rather sad. But this series has the potential to go far and bring a lot back from its travels. I hope that's not an opportunity wasted.

The main character is Iris (all the characters in Iris's club seem to be named after flowers), and she is a member of Flower Girl World™ (FGW) along with friends Rosie And Starr, who were all flower girls at a wedding. I'm not going to get into the propriety of pulling up flowers to toss under the bride's feet at weddings. It's tempting to assume that these flowers were specially cultivated for that purpose, but it looks like the girls simply go grab them directly from flowers and trees growing wild. And am I going to mention the issue of flower girls vs. flower boys? So, moving right along…!

Iris learns she can be a flower girl once more, this time at a wedding in Hawaii, so six months later, off the family travels and Iris meets a new candidate for the FGW. Her name is Hana, which also is a word referencing a flower. Suspiciously convenient, huh?! Hana turns out to be my kind of girl: a real feisty handful of a tomboy, who tends to get very off-task if not closely supervised. She and Iris hatch a plan to catch a fairy known as a menehune, which they then hope to use to do the work of creating leis and other drudge-work for the wedding. They set up a box-trap primed with a cookie under a tree one night and the trap seems to work, but a fierce storm breaks out and they run indoors before they can find out what they caught!

The next day, the entire yard is trashed because of the storm, ruining all the work they'd done the previous day. A power outage also ruins the leis they made and the food they'd prepared, too. Since no storms were predicted, Hana and Iris think they caused all this by trapping the menehune (not that they ever saw what they trapped). Hana, Iris, and Leilani, Hana's older sister troop-off to pluck more blossoms. I have to say there's not much parental supervision going on here, and it badly backfires. Hana, of course, goes charging up the trees and crawling along ever thinner branches, eventually falling. Leilani tries to break her fall and ends up almost breaking her ankle in the process.

But in the end, things tend to work out, and Iris even gets to learn to hula dance. This story seems to me to be a little more 'fluffy' than I’d like, but then it's hardly aimed at me, and it does have some educational content, so with the caveat that I’d like to see this series stretch more and educate a bit more, and also be somewhat more inclusive of the male gender, I'm happy to rate this one as a worthy read. The grey-scale illustrations are charming and the tone upbeat. Like I said, I'd like a little bit more weight and a bit more of the culture in a story like this, but this one is a good start!

Why Girls Are Weird by Pamela Ribon

Title: Why Girls Are Weird
Author: Pamela Ribon
Pages: 306
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: Worthy

Why Girls Are Weird is itself weird. It’s not the usual kind of thing that I'm interested in reading, and it's organized in a rather quaint fashion. It’s pretty much like something Nora Ephron might have written, very much chick-lit. So having said that, this review is going to be rather different from my more obsessive ones, because this novel is harder to review in that way. I've vacillated (yes, vacillated - deal with it!) between enthusiasm about reading it, disdain for it, and repulsion from it, but the reading goes quickly, and I skipped some parts that were too boring even when I was at my most sanguine. Once I found that I was getting through it pretty quickly, I decided that I may as well finish it.

I htink that one of my problems with this is that it's done in such a way as to confuse the author of it with the main charactrer in it! I understand, after some reading around (yes, I read around and I'm not ashamed of it!), including an interview with the author, that there are things in this story which really happened to the author, and/or which happened to the author, but were changed a bit to fit in with the story. One of my favorite bits, the Tae Bo bit, almost got clipped.

The story is of a young woman, Anna Koval, nominally an actress, but who works in a (university?) library, is slightly overweight (so we’re led to believe, unless she's all-too-sadly been deluded about her weight by the world of fashion and make-up, and daytime - and nighttime - TV). She feels somewhat less than content with her life, and she starts a blog almost accidentally out of boredom, and discovers a readership. She finds she has plenty of time to write in the library, and if she's busy whacking the keyboard, people think she's being productive. Her first blog is hilarious about playing with Barbie dolls and other such toys when she was a kid. Later she does one about how a girl can survive watching sports with the guys, and another about her experience with Tae Bo, both of which are funny, but the blogging rapidly devolves into wailing and railing about her life, and her life devolves into commiserating with her gay friend Dale, and that was not that interesting to me, but there turned out to be enough interesting stuff between the maudlin and the boring that it didn’t make me want to toss the book in the trash.

She blogs under the name Anna K, which sounds remarkably like 'anarchy', but we see no such thing in this novel. Anna is very much a normal, ordinary person with no great problems and no great excitements, and who definitely needs to get over her ex, Ian. She smokes, and she drinks perhaps too much, but other than that, there's nothing findamentally wrong with her, yet she feels there is.

In between the blogging portions, she adds in some responses from her readership (which gets up to 5,000 - very respectable, but about which she's clueless) and in between the blogs and the responses is the real story of her life. I say real story because she's lying a lot in the blog. She claims she has a relationship with a guy, but Ian is actually an ex of hers who is dating a woman she was once friends with. A year on, Anna still can’t let him go, nor can she decide what to do about him when she learns he's broken up with the other woman. The blog is a rather sick way of pretending she's still dating him. Anna has a lot of issues, especially when her father dies (this really happens; it’s not something she makes up). She also gets inveigled (there it is again) into being the sponsor for a group of girls led by one young girl called Smith (just Smith) who wanted to start a group meeting but don't have any idea what their group should be about.

Anna ends up meeting two of the people who respond to her blog. Tess is younger than Anna and they have a falling out, but then hook up again and become friends, after a fashion, and then fall out again. Lloyd Dobler (not his real name which is Kurt) is an older guy who sounds downright scary to begin with, which makes me wonder what is wrong with Anna when she encourages him, but in the end he turns out to be okay as far as I can tell so far, if a bit weird, too. He seems at first to be good for her, but then becomes a problem because she begins to fantasize about him. When she's invited to an Internet conference in Pittsburgh by Tess, she notifes Kurt, who lives there, and arranges to meet him. He chickens out of their first "date" with a crisis of confidence, but later he calls her and they arrange to meet her for lunch the next day, which turns into them spending the day and then the night together.

Anna is determined to tell him the real truth about her life, especially since she spent the previous day telling Tess the truth (no, that wasn't why they had a second falling out), but she ends up leaving without making the requisite effort to get the truth out to him. It's then that it becomes overwhelmingly apparent what Anna's only failing is: Anna Koval is an invertebrate! She didn't have the spine to tell the truth on her blog. She didn't have the spine to stand up to Ian and take her full fifty percent of the relationship into her own hands, and finally, when it counts most of all, she doesn't have the spine to tell the love of her life, Kurt, the truth - she lets people walk all over her. But that's seems about to change.

After letting Smith down by not being there for the really she organized, Anna urges her to organize another and she attends this one, which takes off like a jetliner, with a lot of the girls shaving their heads so they'll be easily recognized and encouraging others to come up to them and talk to them if they see them out in the street, about whatever they want to talk about. Anna steps up and gets her head shaved, too.

She coems home to find Ian sleeping on her futon (he still has her key a year later), abd he either doesn't even notice her shaved head or he doesn't care to comment on it. She has to wear a blond wig to her friend's wedding because she's a bridesmaid. When she goes to her annual Gyno exam, she has a new doctor who asks about her family history which leads to her dead dad which leads her to finally grieve for him. She starts deleting whole monthly folders from her blog, and she decides to call Kurt again - having been unable to reach him since they parted.

After an awkward conversation, they agree to meet. Since she has lost her job at the library, and can afford no trips (but can still smoke and buy expensive coffee!), he will come to Austin for a visit, and they will see how it goes. It ends with an offer from a local newspaper to transfer her blog to their web site.