Book log: The Pursuit of Happiness, The Market, Survivor Antarctica: Reality TV 2083

The Pursuit of Happiness by Tara Altebrando

Betsy Irving is not looking forward to spending all summer working at Morrisville, a colonial village reenactment. She dreads wearing the colonial clothes, giving the tours, and hanging out with Liza Henske, the school goth. But when her mother dies, she begins to look forward to the escape that Morrisville provides--from her too-empty house, from the boyfriend who dumped her, from the friends who don't understand.

As Betsy throws herself into her summer job, she begins to learn a few things. Like, that Liza Henske is nothing at all like her reputation. And that when she's with James, the woodcarver's apprentice, she starts to feel complete again.

This book made me want to write a letter to Tara Altebrando, asking her why she let this book be published by MTV and branded as such a cheesy summer read. I almost passed it by--I would have, if I hadn't read a glowing review of it in a blog I trust. As it is, I took it out of the library three times before I actually got to reading it.

This book is good. It's really, really, good. It's ache in your heart because the writing is true good. It's a book that doesn't hold its punches and doesn't follow lines of cliche and doesn't do what you expect, and that makes it feel all the more honest.

Betsy's voice is heartbreaking--she just lost her mother, and she's trying to deal with that loss, and with the guilt of not always having liked her mother, and at the same time realizing that her mother was a person. She's trying to put her broken family back together. She's trying to hold on to her friends, and she's not so good at it, the state she's in.

This book doesn't demonize anyone. It--and Betsy--recognize that people are flawed, but they're still people, and they still have good in them, and it's fantastic. I hate it when the best friend at the start of a book is a bitch by the end. This book doesn't look at anything in two dimensions--all the characters, even the ones you don't expect to matter, are in full, real technicolor.

I highly recommend this book. Ignore the lame cheesy teen summer cover, ignore the packaging, and go straight for the text. This book is really, really good. It deserves to be a big book. I will definitly be looking for more of Tara Altebrando's work in the future--I am only sorry that this one took me so long to get to.

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The Market by J.M. Steele

Kate Winthrop is an average teenage girl. She has her two best friends, is four weeks away from graduation, and is perfectly happy with her life as it is. And then, at a party she has no business attending, she overhears someone mockingly call her "Seventy-One." Next thing she knows, she's gotten a mysterious IM with a link to the Millbank Market, a stock-market-esque website that rates the "stock" of each of the 140 girls in Millbank's graduating class. Kate is #71.

At first, Kate is crushed to discover that she's not even in the top 70. But then, she and her friends concoct a plan: they'll invest in her stock, and then give her a makeover so that her "value" shoots up--and then they'll make a killing.

It's a great idea--at first. But as the social experiment progresses, Kate and her friends get so wrapped up in it that they begin to forget the things that are really important. Will becoming a hot commodity make Kate forget all the things she really cares about?

This book gets two stars because the concept is so much fun. It's a great and silly idea, and with the right execution, this could have been a great book.

Unfortunately, the writing is terrible. The voice is cheesy and over-the-top. Kate, and all of her friends--all of the characters--are cliches. The plot is so predictable that I could cheerfully have bet my life savings on the direction it would take and not had to worry. The parts of the book which actually could have been interesting are introduced as a plot point and then completely ignored. There were a hundred ways to make this novel meaningful, interesting, powerful and entertaining all at once--and instead, JM Steele chose to make it a predictable, shallow cliche.

This book is a definite sell.

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Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 by Andrea White

In 2083, until 8th grade, kids attend teleschool. They watch reality television that is loosely designed to teach them things—Historical Survivor, Dialing for Dollars, and more. Kids who want to continue their education—the only way to really make anything of yourself—is to attempt the Toss, a roll of the dice that determines if you will receive a government scholarship.

Polly, Robert, Grace, Andrew and Billy have lost their Tosses, and have been chosen to be the participants in Historical Survivor: Antarctica. They’ll struggle to survive Antarctica, and recreate Captain Scott’s doomed mission to reach the Pole. It’s a brutal struggle for survival, all filmed for reality television and the entertainment of the viewers. As conditions worsen, the teens need to band together to try to make it out of Antarctica alive.

A lot of the concepts in this book seem a little silly, and the characters all feel a little stilted. The Urban Trash Wars, teleschool, flavored nutrient chips—it has all the fixins of a developed futuristic society, but somehow they don’t fall solidly into place. But once you get past all the marginal silly, this becomes a gripping tale of survival. It took me a little while to get into it, but once I was halfway through, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.