“I’m not bleak. I’m realistic. I mean it, too. I don’t hate my life and I’m
not unhappy. It is just that I understand the way that the world works. I don’t
need to pretend.”
Like many a YA novel this is the story of a senior year. June Rafferty
just wants it over and to be able to move on with “real” life. She has been paired with Oliver in a carpool
in an evil conspiracy set up by their mothers.
She is pretty sure that it is just to make her miserable.
June know
that she is smart… no one is on her level of smartness. She is smarter than
everyone else so of course it is okay for her to be mean and judgmental. I
really didn’t like her. Condescension is not something that I forgive a
character for easily. Or really ever. It made it hard to get the “cute”.
And there
was cuteness:
“We haven’t
spent much time together since Kindergarten, when we got married under the monkey
bars in a ceremony officiated by Shaun Banerjee. Our relationship was consummated
with a sticky kiss and then annulled a couple of hours later when we got into
an argument during art class. It
culminated in our sitting in the principal’s office, dripping blue paint,
waiting for our mom’s to bring us clean clothes.”
June and
Oliver start debating the Great Question of High School: Are these the best
times (or at least significant and important times) of our lives or are they a
placeholder while we wait for the “real” world to allow us to join it at the
grown up table. It actually is an
interesting question. I know that I was
with June on this one when I was in High School. I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t bullied. But I was so busy being self-conscious and
shy that I really didn’t experience many of the “typical” high school
moments. I think that there is something
to be said for being fully invested in the moment that you happen to be in
rather than waiting for life to happen.
June
dislikes Oliver. Or at least June
dislikes who she things Oliver is. Predictably,
they start to get closer as they get to know one another on their daily commute.
June has a boyfriend and, of course,
Oliver has a girlfriend. This leaves
them in the gray area of being “just friends” while pining for one
another. Yeah, maybe I didn’t miss much
in high school… Cue months of misunderstandings, longing looks, and secondary
characters constantly asking what is up with them. And since there are very
short flash forwards to Prom it isn’t as if the outcome is really much of a
surprise.
I found the
music motif pretty tired in YA so in order for it not to be cliché and boring
an author really has to have unique take on it or at least make the music feel
vibrant. Sadly, this was a fail. I can think of half a dozen books off the top
of my head that did it better.
What I did
like was the exploration of the idea that everyone, no matter how cliché or
predictable they may seem, has hidden depths and is much more complicated than
they might seem on the surface. I also thought that the writing was quite
good. Although, I did not love Shuffle,
Repeat I will most likely try a different book by this author. Jillian Cade: (Fake) ParanormalInvestigator is going on my TBR pile.
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