Eleventh grader Louise Harrison’s comfortably self-centered existence turns chaotic when her younger brother discovers their father receiving fellatio from Louise’s best friend Sienna’s mother (a plot development that leads to the cringe-inducingly frequent use of the phrase “blow job”). Facing the notion that her parents are not just a monolithic social unit but real people in a sadly self-destructing relationship with all the grace of an incensed baboon, Louise flings herself from one stereotypical problem-novel issue to another. She is forced to get a job, loses her place at the periphery of popularity once golden-girl Sienna dumps her, falls for a perfect boy who comes out when she tries to seduce him and stomps around in petulant horror when her mother falls in love and conceives a baby with her algebra teacher, Mr. Bartley. These issues have been canvassed with greater skill, resonance and appeal many times before—in the Princess Diaries and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Sarah Dessen’s Just Listen, for example—and readers will wish they were reading one of those books instead of this overstuffed mess. (Fiction. YA)
