Korman is a good date: Laugh-out-loud funny, honest, hot and sweet, he knows how to start a story with lines about Republicans and body-cavity searches in the first few pages. Leo, our hero, is a senior with a scholarship to Harvard, a tangential relationship to the Young Republicans, good, loving parents and Goth-goddess Melinda, whom he’s known all his life. But shortly readers—and Leo—discover that a good deed gets him accused of cheating, loses him his scholarship and reveals to him his hitherto unknown parentage. One night’s backstage indiscretion by his mom meant that Leo’s biological father is none other than King Maggot, lead screamer of Purge, the band that practically founded punk, and Melinda’s hero. Leo spends the summer after senior year as a roadie for Purge’s reunion tour, with its standard excesses and odd charms chronicled in Leo’s self-aware, slightly dorky voice. This has virtually the same plotline as Liza Conrad’s “chicklet-lit” Rock My World (2005), and the two would make a great couple. (Fiction. YA)
