Teens

Teen Book Reviews Spring 2007

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Lee Fiora is a fourteen-year-old girl from a small town in Indiana. She is very smart but feels trapped in her hometown where she is much more academically ahead of the other students at the local high school. When she is awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious Ault School, a boarding school in Massachusetts, she jumps at the chance. When Lee arrives, she quickly learns that most Ault students are incredibly wealthy, and starts to feels self-conscious because she doesn't have the privileges that the other kids do. The book follows Lee's life throughout her four years of high school, where she goes through many changes such as keeping her grades up, making and loosing friends, and pining for her secret crush. A now twenty-something Lee narrates the book, as she remembers what her high school experience was like. Almost all high school students will be able to relate to her innocence, and her yearning to belong.

An Abundance of Katherine's by John Green

Colin Singleton is a former child prodigy who in the course of his eighteen years of life has dated nineteen girls named Katherine. But when the nineteenth Katherine breaks up with him right after high school graduation, he is crushed. Hassan, Collin's couch potato best friend, doesn't want Collin to waste the summer pitying himself, so he arranges for the two of them to take a road trip. After a short while, the boys find themselves in rural Tennessee where they promptly meet a popular local girl named Lindsey Lee, and are offered jobs and a place to live by Lindsey and her mother. Throughout the story, Collin and Hassan share many experiences with Lindsey and her crowd of friends. The book also details Collins summer as he tries to come up with mathematical reasoning's for the downfall of his past relationships through an obsession of anagrams and numerical charts.

Fix by Leslie Margolis

Three years before eighteen-year-old Cameron Beekman moved to a new town, she was ridiculed about her large nose. Determined to look perfect for her new school, she undergoes a rhinoplasty (nose job) and soon soars up the popularity ladder, attaining a tight knit group of best friends and a devoted boyfriend. Allie, Cameron's fifteen-year-old sister, starts getting teased about her nose too, so their former model/movie star mother Julie decides her younger daughter should get the procedure done as well. Just as Cameron decides she wants to get another procedure done before heading off to college, Allie starts to wonder if she really needs to take such drastic measures to look "perfect". The book, which flips from Cameron to Allie's point of views, divulges into the world of teenage plastic surgery, and how it alters much more than physical appearance.

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