NUMBER 6 FUMBLES

Youth-directed imprint’s latest installment: a cringe-inducing first novel tracking a heavy-partying University of Pennsylvania sophomore who undergoes “buzz kill” with existential repercussions while watching Number 6 fumble the football during a Penn-Cornell game.

Rebecca “Beck” Lowe is supposed to be “the one who makes the plans,” the multi-shot drinker at all-night frat bars who can then churn out a paper for her morning class, the full-of-fun entertainer and reluctant virgin who quotes from Jay McInerney's Story of My Life. According to Beck, however, she's also a vulnerable only child harboring deep-seated wounds concerning her working parents' tough-love inattention to her quirkiness. Doesn't her mother owe her an apology for criticizing the paper she wrote comparing Walt Whitman's poetry and Jesse Jackson's speeches, especially since it gained her an A-plus? The problem is, Beck's not sure who she is or is supposed to be, and climbing drunkenly into eager guys' dorm beds every night while waiting for the “one good one” doesn't help her. Will it be Ryan, the tall, well-meaning freshman who lied about his age and never calls? Or totally nice Trey, or solicitous, always-faithful Scott, or one of their helpful best friends? When Beck sees Number 6 fumble at the big game, she feels the magnitude of other people's expectations and the irksome weight of having to “sit down and think about things.” “I'm like this cliché fall-apart girl crying under the vines,” reads a typical breast-beating passage of this adolescent diary. Unfortunately, the author's slangy, pedestrian prose can't compel a reader to care one way or the other about her character's growing pangs.

Solar-Tuttle's fledgling effort has a beginning, middle, and end—but otherwise bears little resemblance to a real novel.