A funny love story centered on a winning idea: a boy, in love with a girl who fancies herself a future romance author, doesn’t know how to tell her that her writing stinks. Sage Oliver’s romance novel, starring beautiful, smart, sexy Angelica, is moving right along. When she reads chapters out loud to her favorite boy, George Blandford, though, he’s not impressed. Angelica and the Seminole Indians is awful, but George, a secret poet who has loved Sage forever, can’t bring himself to hurt her. His attempts to tell her the truth backfire; Sage is so confident that she misunderstands almost everything he says as further endorsement of her talent. When Sage enters the school’s creative writing contest, George can’t bear the thought of her being exposed to criticism and rejection; as it turns out, she shares first place honors with George and his anonymous poems—the judges thought Sage was parodying the romance genre brilliantly. For Sage, it’s a revelation and a disappointment, but, as this is a comedy, all turns out well. The characters are as interesting and fully formed as the premise, while the Angelica chapters form a lesson in hack-writing that will keep readers amused. (Fiction. 10-14)
