Review: Wicked Jealous

WICKED JEALOUS
Robin Palmer
Speak

Used to being known as That Weird Fat Girl, Simone Walker has no problem with keeping her head down and staying invisible. But when Hillary, her "stepmother-to-be" (despite the fact that Simone's workaholic father is avoiding the whole "marriage" issue) moves in and takes over, Simone has to find a way to get out of the house. Even if it means inadvertently joining a Zumba class full of middle-aged women. Soon, she's looking and feeling healthier -- which is lucky, because when Hillary kicks her out of what was supposed to be a family vacation, Simone ends up living with her older brother and six of his college buddies. Now, with her best friend insisting on a makeover and a popular boy who actually notices her, the advice of seven college guys is helpful, but it also makes things pretty complicated.

Okay, here's the deal: this is an updated, contemporary version of Snow White, with Simone in the starring role of the princess herself. It's a love story (as the subtitle says), but it's also a story of Simone's jealous stepmother-to-be, and more importantly her own journey to becoming a healthier, happier, more sure-of-herself girl. Which is, incidentally, exactly the type of book I enjoy reading. Robin Palmer does a great job of keeping the trademark elements of Snow White while changing and updating the story to make it a realistic, contemporary tale. Though this is something Palmer always seems to do well, I was especially impressed with this novel -- the well-placed bits from the traditional Snow White elevate this sweet tale. Simone's brother and his six roommates (you know, like the seven dwarves) just made this book for me. The camaraderie between them and Simone was great and the scenes between them were some of the funniest, best, and sometimes cutest in the book. All of them were such great characters with awesome, distinct personalities.

Though the storyline between Simone and Hilary, her dad's girlfriend, is a bit far-fetched and hard to believe at times, this is an easy thing to forgive in light of how fun and, yes, pretty realistic, the rest of the story is. For readers who like fairytale retellings or just lighthearted contemporary YA, this is a great one to put on your list. It's quickly become my favorite of Robin Palmer's novels.  Wicked Jealous hits stores July 19th.

Review: Cindy Ella

CINDY ELLA
Robin Palmer

When Cindy Ella Gold writes a scathing anti-Prom letter to the editor of her school's newspaper (and it gets printed!) she becomes the focus of her classmate's mockery. Instead of bridging the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots," as she intended, the letter instead just serves to make Cindy the common enemy of her materialistic, Prom-loving classmates, including her two popular stepsisters.

As you can probably tell from the title, this is a modern retelling of the whole "Cinderella" thing, with a decidedly more opinionated (and anti-fairytale) heroine. Cindy, though she boycotts the Prom, still finds herself dealing with plenty of boy-drama. Her online best friend, the popular boy she's liked since forever, and her new, older tutor she's convinced is her soul mate soulmate. Whatever that means. It would be so easy, in all of this, for Cindy's character to be a complete mess, but the contradictions of her character are presented wonderfully and with humor. Though she fancies herself a "nouveau" feminist and insists that she has deeper thoughts than her classmates, she also freely admits to loving MTV's My Super Sweet 16 and catching only glimpses of big news stories on her way to more interesting things. In some characters this sort of hypocrisy would be insanely annoying, but Cindy manages to approach everything with a healthy dose of humor and though she's opinionated she also seems to realize that she doesn't really know everything. While many of the other characters here, including her two best friends, are a bit one-note, they're also entertaining and un-annoying.

Prom Fever is depicted pretty well here and though it seems a bit extreme at times the superficial and materialistic fictional school Cindy attends is written so well that the extremeness of her fellow students doesn't feel forced. The plot, revolving around Cindy's anti-Prom stance and boy-drama, is cute but predictable. There are a few things that I did find a bit too unreal, such as Cindy and her best friends thinking that it's totally okay for her to contemplate dating a 23-year-old, and the fact that at least three different people close to her thought that she was self-harming for no obvious reason,  but on the whole the book was cute enough for those things to be overlooked. The identity of her online best guy friend is obvious pretty early on but this doesn't take away from how adorable it is when Cindy finally finds out.

Though this book is predictable and more than a little cheesy at times, with a few annoying plot points, it's also incredibly cute and funny, with a realistic and witty main character that I absolutely loved.

Review: Geek Charming

GEEK CHARMING
Robin Palmer


When Josh, an aspiring film student and future director, sets out to make a film about the popular kids at his Beverly Hills high school, Miss Popular herself is the topic of his film. Dylan Schoenfield, whose father owns a fricking mall, is the very definition of the word "snob." She's everything you expect your stereotypical popular high school girl to be: smug, vain, conceited, and incredibly shallow and superficial. When the two of them meet and start working together, Josh is determined to make a "fair and balanced" documentary, which means finding some shred of relatability and humanness in the designer-clad Dylan. For Dylan, Josh is an annoyance her daddy is forcing her to put up with and she's totally shocked to learn that "Geek Boy" isn't as horrible as she thought. He's actually kind of... sweet? And normal?

GEEK CHARMING, told in Dylan and Josh's rotating first-person viewpoints, is set up as your classic "opposites attract" story. In the first few chapters Dylan is even more annoying, self-centered, and shallow than you could possibly imagine. That, and she seems incredibly stupid. I mean, seriously, if you have a boyfriend of two years who REFUSES TO TALK TO YOU, there's obviously something wrong. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. So yes, Dylan got on my nerves; in the first scene all I wanted was for someone to come up and push her into the fountain her purse had fallen into, maybe slap some sense into her.

As for Josh, he was like a Wikipedia of film facts and incredibly motivated and dedicated to his goals. He was portrayed as the Ultimate Geek, which is why I was so surprised to find how absolutely boring I found him. While Dylan was superficial and conceited in the beginning, she eventually showed more depth and ultimately grew as a person while our "geek charming" was... dull. There was nothing about him that we didn't know from the beginning and aside from a superficial makeover from Dylan, he didn't change in any meaningful ways throughout the book. I hate that I couldn't like him more, but he just wasn't a compelling character.

What I did love about this book - despite the stereotypes - was the relationship that grew between Dylan and Josh. Under the guise of Josh's film project, a friendship develops and I can honestly say that it's one of the most refreshing boy/girl friendships I've read lately, made more so by the fact that they're so different from each other. And though I thought I knew how this book was going to go from before I finished the first page, the ending surprised me (in a good way) despite the abruptness of the conclusion. All in all, I enjoyed this book. It probably could have been a shorter book for what the story was, but it definitely had its awww moments, and the relationship that grew between the two main characters was awesome.