{"id":3212,"date":"2005-06-07T04:12:00","date_gmt":"2005-06-07T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=3212"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:25:01","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:25:01","slug":"summer-reads-of-high-school-cliques-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=3212","title":{"rendered":"Summer Reads: Of High School Cliques and Tank Tops"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing a bit of housekeeping, and ran across this wee book review from A. Fortis on a book I&#8217;ve yet to read: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.booksense.com\/product\/info.jsp?affiliateId=ReadersResponse&#038;isbn=0689850921\"> The True Meaning of Cleavage<\/a> by Mariah Fredericks. Into my beach bag it goes!  A. Fortis says:<\/p>\n<p><em>I picked up this book assuming it was going to be total trash. Sure, I was drawn in by the title, but after reading the comment on the front cover by Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries (\u201cLaugh out loud funny and way twisted!\u201d), I assumed it was going to be at worst sappy and at best drearily generic. The back cover didn\u2019t help\u2014the blurb indicated your basic school novel: friendships changing upon entering high school, crushes, cliques, etc. Plus there was a \u201cTrue Meaning of Cleavage\u201d tank top offer. None of the signs pointed to a meaningful reading experience, but I thought, what the hey. Let\u2019s see what\u2019s considered a trendy teen read.<\/p>\n<p>I was actually pleasantly surprised. It was not \u201cway twisted,\u201d whatever that means to Meg Cabot, but I enjoyed it. There wasn\u2019t an overabundance of deep meaning, but there was much more going on than I expected. The characters were believable and quite well written, although I felt that the narrator, a pre-geeky girl named Jess who\u2019s interested in sci-fi and art (a girl after my own heart!) was a little too wise for her age. Most of the time she seemed at least sixteen to me, with hardly any awkward ninth-grade moments; if she had them, she was somehow too self-aware about them to seem believably a freshman. <\/p>\n<p>But the writing was surprisingly good. I didn\u2019t expect that. The narrator was endearing and funny, and I winced along with her as her friend Sari has various misadventures and becomes susceptible to the high school clique atmosphere. It was a quick, easy, fun read\u2014and I came out of it caring about the characters.<\/p>\n<p>B+<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Stay tuned for more books suitable for porch swings and mint juleps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doing a bit of housekeeping, and ran across this wee book review from A. Fortis on a book I&#8217;ve yet to read:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-3212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3324,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3212\/revisions\/3324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}