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...Or Not?
When 14 year-old Cassie Sullivan-smart, sensitive, and perceptive-stands up for her beliefs, the flagpole Christian majority decides she's the school Antichrist. Cassie had no idea defending Darwin and refusing to sing "Proud to be an American" would be such a big deal. But it's a brave new world of post-9/11 paranoia in her über-conservative Colorado school. Trying to stay cool while the torments increase, Cassie wonders if anything is really worth it. Taking solace in her journal, she begins to question if simply being is what she really wants. Or Not?
- GenresYoung AdultContemporary
408 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 28, 2012
It took me a really looong time to get through this book. I read it during a phase of reading YA fiction with protagonists that were 13-15 years-old so I was fairly immersed in that point of view at that time. I felt the main character of this book did not have that voice, that 13-15 y/o stumbling through life voice. Actually, she didn't seem to have much of a personality at all, especially considering her circumstances. And that is why it took me so very long to finish the book; I was constantly irritated with the non-genuine-sounding teenage girl. I also did not enjoy the ridiculous amount of music and literature references; it felt like an extended book discussion.
To me, the story lacked warmth and accessibility. There were too many just-barely-out-of-date pop-culture references which made the author sound like he was trying to be all with-it but missed it by a month. I couldn't connect with any of the characters. It just didn't draw me in. Finally, toward the end, she became a little more tolerable, closer to a realistic character...or so I thought. Just when I stopped wanting to shut the book on her, she suddenly has a profound realization about life and its problems and the potential solutions. From there, her grand cliche epiphany starts showing up in every single chapter. Over and over to the point of hellfire-and-brimstone preachy-ness. I felt that perhaps the author had experienced grieving over a student who had committed suicide and this message is how he tells other teens not to follow that path? While he's not wrong, delivering the message on repeat in a short amount of time is not going to help anyone.
And what was with the anti-Christian sentiment? Apparently, all God-believers are sheep so while her comfort in classic rock vinyl is hip, comfort via faith is not. I'm not a Christian and I found this offensive.
The hypocrisy, the constant pop-culture references, the whole victim shpeil, it was all too much for my taste.
So why did I even bother finishing the book, you ask? Because I promised I would. And then I never told the person how I felt about it because he loved it so very much and I didn't have the energy to have that conversation; he's grown up a bit since so we could probably discuss it now.
To me, the story lacked warmth and accessibility. There were too many just-barely-out-of-date pop-culture references which made the author sound like he was trying to be all with-it but missed it by a month. I couldn't connect with any of the characters. It just didn't draw me in. Finally, toward the end, she became a little more tolerable, closer to a realistic character...or so I thought. Just when I stopped wanting to shut the book on her, she suddenly has a profound realization about life and its problems and the potential solutions. From there, her grand cliche epiphany starts showing up in every single chapter. Over and over to the point of hellfire-and-brimstone preachy-ness. I felt that perhaps the author had experienced grieving over a student who had committed suicide and this message is how he tells other teens not to follow that path? While he's not wrong, delivering the message on repeat in a short amount of time is not going to help anyone.
And what was with the anti-Christian sentiment? Apparently, all God-believers are sheep so while her comfort in classic rock vinyl is hip, comfort via faith is not. I'm not a Christian and I found this offensive.
The hypocrisy, the constant pop-culture references, the whole victim shpeil, it was all too much for my taste.
So why did I even bother finishing the book, you ask? Because I promised I would. And then I never told the person how I felt about it because he loved it so very much and I didn't have the energy to have that conversation; he's grown up a bit since so we could probably discuss it now.
November 16, 2012
Reviewed by Marta Morrison for TeensReadToo.com
Cassie is my hero. She is an intelligent non-conformist who is stuck in junior high.
...OR NOT? starts with the summer before Cassie goes into eighth grade. It is told through Cassie's journal. She lives with her mom and dad and has a brother in college. They live in Colorado and have a rustic cabin, which she loves, in the mountains. Her family walks to a different drummer, with her father being a lawyer and her mother a musician.
They are a family who talks at the dinner table of politics and philosophy. They enjoy being together, especially at the cabin. That is where Cassie would like to be always. She loves the mountains and all of nature. She really is at home there.
Cassie doesn't fit in at school, though. She is odd because she really doesn't care about the things that her classmates care about. Her style of dress is different and she shaves off her hair, but doesn't shave her legs. She has fits of depression and thoughts of suicide. During her eighth-grade year she finally finds a group of friends. But before that she must endure religious intolerance, paranoia, and horrible bullying.
The school officials were ineffective, which made me sad but is also realistic because I teach school and it can be a minefield. Cassie discovers and learns to really love herself by the end of the novel and it is a truly wondrous ride. I recommend this book if you really don't fit, but even if you do you might learn something about how the other half feels. I laughed, cried, and couldn't wait to hear what would happen to Cassie. ...OR NOT? is also well-written. It's always nice when the story is great and the writing superb!
Cassie is my hero. She is an intelligent non-conformist who is stuck in junior high.
...OR NOT? starts with the summer before Cassie goes into eighth grade. It is told through Cassie's journal. She lives with her mom and dad and has a brother in college. They live in Colorado and have a rustic cabin, which she loves, in the mountains. Her family walks to a different drummer, with her father being a lawyer and her mother a musician.
They are a family who talks at the dinner table of politics and philosophy. They enjoy being together, especially at the cabin. That is where Cassie would like to be always. She loves the mountains and all of nature. She really is at home there.
Cassie doesn't fit in at school, though. She is odd because she really doesn't care about the things that her classmates care about. Her style of dress is different and she shaves off her hair, but doesn't shave her legs. She has fits of depression and thoughts of suicide. During her eighth-grade year she finally finds a group of friends. But before that she must endure religious intolerance, paranoia, and horrible bullying.
The school officials were ineffective, which made me sad but is also realistic because I teach school and it can be a minefield. Cassie discovers and learns to really love herself by the end of the novel and it is a truly wondrous ride. I recommend this book if you really don't fit, but even if you do you might learn something about how the other half feels. I laughed, cried, and couldn't wait to hear what would happen to Cassie. ...OR NOT? is also well-written. It's always nice when the story is great and the writing superb!
August 14, 2010
I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. It started out good then slowly the fire dwindled out for me, I could hardly even finish the book by the time the last hundred or so pages came around.
November 10, 2008
Really, REALLY didn't like the main character. Stopped reading.
February 5, 2011
This book was really good but sometimes very confusing and a bit cliche.
August 10, 2014
This may not be the kind of young adult fiction that a thirty-something can appreciate. But I went in wanting to like it.
Our protagonist Cassie is a 13-going-on-14-year-old vegan, child of liberal parents (whose views she seems to share wholly, aside from the veganism), social misfit. Okay, she hasn't thought about the class system yet or the roots of poverty. Okay, she says she's patriotic even though she won't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at school and she refuses to sing "Proud To Be an American" in choir (but "America the Beautiful" is okay...) -- no, all the contradictions haven't exactly been worked out. She isn't a role model for the internationalist, anti-capitalist kids I hope my peers are raising. But yes, she is vegan and she does speak up for evolution when her Christian classmates challenge a science article. So there's potential.
To be honest, Cassie is the kind of girl who would have terrified me as a junior-high student. Not because our core views were really all that different, but because Cassie so obviously opposes the "system." I wouldn't have understood the Pledge of Allegiance thing, or purposefully throwing a standardized test. And I definitely wouldn't have gotten the atheist thing. In my junior high, I was a bit of a weirdo for taking Catholic social teaching seriously (like don't kill. Seriously, don't). So it was difficult, reading this novel, to accept the realism of a junior-high class that turns on a student because she doesn't believe that the earth is 6,000-years-old or that Jesus is behind the stars. Perhaps the distance in generation (pre-9/11 v. post-) between me and Cassie, or geographic location (New Jersey v. Colorado), explains it.
Or maybe the authorship just isn't all there. The novel consists of Cassie's diary entries as she enters eighth grade, as well as three variations on a short story she completes for writing club. To his credit, Mandabach has written what I believe is a pretty realistic vision of this girl's diary and inner world, proof that his experience as a teacher and parent has paid off. What it also proves to me, however, is that fictional diaries are not particularly fun or edifying to read.
I spent most of the 400-pages waiting for a plot to show up. Is it about Cassie's relationship with her brother's girlfriend Ally, the slightly older mentor to assure her "it gets better"? Is it Cassie recovering from depression and making peace with the world as it is? Is it her slowly developing relationship with the other misfits in her class, especially one boy? It's all of these, and none of them, and in that sense reflects the messiness of real life. But I had expected at least to find the novel revolving around a central political question -- must Cassie sing the hated song? Or will she be allowed to sit out? Will this lead to other students refusing to sing songs they object to, and will that snowball into some larger exploration of civil liberties?
But no.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a novel that doesn't neatly present a conflict and resolution. But without a central plot, either internal or external, the author has to give the reader better clues to why we should keep reading. Aside from Cassie, I got very little sense of who or what the characters are like, precisely because we only see them through Cassie's eyes in her journal. (I wasn't particularly deft at character development when I was a teenager writing in my diary, either...) When Cassie starts to form a friendship and then more than a friendship with a particular boy, I couldn't remember a thing about him from earlier in the novel, except that he'd been mentioned as another of her classmates that hung out with the misfits. The same went for Cassie's original lunch-table-mates and tormenters (as far as I am concerned, an interchangeable group of shy Christian girls, and aggressive Christian girls and boys, respectively).
Other characters are introduced as if they will be significant, and then never show up to do anything significant, such as the one nice teacher at the school who runs Tolkien and writing club, and the school librarian who offers Cassie a refuge during lunch-time. A big deal is made, late in the novel, about Cassie going to therapy. After describing her first session in detail, her second session is only mentioned (okay, fine, we don't need a play-by-play every time...)...and she never goes again, an entire plot point tossed away when Cassie simply asserts "I was never going there again." This is, I believe, one way genre fiction tends to be stronger than general fiction; you just don't find this kind of non-starter stuff in sci-fi or mysteries.
I did appreciate the realistic way, however, Mandabach handles the reality of things like suicidal thoughts, heavy fictional stories, and parental concern for teenagers. It's a society where parents and educators are held responsible for kids' total well-being -- from predicting the kids who are suicidal or homicidal to just bullies or early drinkers or sex-havers -- and preventing all risky and harmful behavior, while parents and educators don't actually have the power to change the circumstances that make kids feel suicidal or homicidal, or like being drunk; and this translates to protectiveness and overreactions that Cassie's diary keenly reflects. Her teachers and parents can respond to symptoms, but never root causes. When she writes a story that features the main character's suicide, her teacher calls in administrators and parents for what amounts to an intervention. The concern would be comical if it weren't so serious and so stifling. (On a side note: I found Cassie's parents, particularly her lawyer, snappy-quipping dad, absolutely insufferable, a parody of actually cool, supportive parents, who do exist and have intelligent conversations with their children.)
Veganism is a feature of Cassie's character that fits both her sensitivity to suffering and her connection to the natural world. With her love for vinyl records and disdain for most later technologies (this is actually a teenager who does not watch TV), she seems well on her way to primitive anarchism. While Mandabach gets a lot of things right about being vegan and living your life -- Cassie orders a cheese-less pizza when she's out with her friends, she buys her first make-up only after learning it's all vegan -- some of it felt out-of-step. Early in the novel, she describes her family's cabin and her father and brother fishing. I kept waiting for her vegan's-eye-view of the subject, but instead we first get a romantic description of her dad whispering to the fish as he catches-and-releases. Later, Cassie describes how, the year she was first vegan, she ruined the annual fishing trip by throwing a stone to scare the fish away right as her brother cast. After a physical fight between the siblings, Dad decided to cut the trip short: "No fish will bleed this day." But that's all we get. Whatever easy or uneasy truce Cassie reached with her family about fishing since then (because the other members of the family do continue to fish and Cassie presumably objects), this is left unsaid. It would have only taken another sentence or two, but Mandabach never re-visits it. Either it didn't seem important to the author (who is not vegan, but does love fishing...) or he believed he'd already pushed his non-vegan audience far enough into animal rights territory. This is clearly not the story he wants to tell, or where his interests lie.
A worthy effort, with some very keen moments, but like many real diaries that get published, this one could have used some more editing.
Our protagonist Cassie is a 13-going-on-14-year-old vegan, child of liberal parents (whose views she seems to share wholly, aside from the veganism), social misfit. Okay, she hasn't thought about the class system yet or the roots of poverty. Okay, she says she's patriotic even though she won't stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at school and she refuses to sing "Proud To Be an American" in choir (but "America the Beautiful" is okay...) -- no, all the contradictions haven't exactly been worked out. She isn't a role model for the internationalist, anti-capitalist kids I hope my peers are raising. But yes, she is vegan and she does speak up for evolution when her Christian classmates challenge a science article. So there's potential.
To be honest, Cassie is the kind of girl who would have terrified me as a junior-high student. Not because our core views were really all that different, but because Cassie so obviously opposes the "system." I wouldn't have understood the Pledge of Allegiance thing, or purposefully throwing a standardized test. And I definitely wouldn't have gotten the atheist thing. In my junior high, I was a bit of a weirdo for taking Catholic social teaching seriously (like don't kill. Seriously, don't). So it was difficult, reading this novel, to accept the realism of a junior-high class that turns on a student because she doesn't believe that the earth is 6,000-years-old or that Jesus is behind the stars. Perhaps the distance in generation (pre-9/11 v. post-) between me and Cassie, or geographic location (New Jersey v. Colorado), explains it.
Or maybe the authorship just isn't all there. The novel consists of Cassie's diary entries as she enters eighth grade, as well as three variations on a short story she completes for writing club. To his credit, Mandabach has written what I believe is a pretty realistic vision of this girl's diary and inner world, proof that his experience as a teacher and parent has paid off. What it also proves to me, however, is that fictional diaries are not particularly fun or edifying to read.
I spent most of the 400-pages waiting for a plot to show up. Is it about Cassie's relationship with her brother's girlfriend Ally, the slightly older mentor to assure her "it gets better"? Is it Cassie recovering from depression and making peace with the world as it is? Is it her slowly developing relationship with the other misfits in her class, especially one boy? It's all of these, and none of them, and in that sense reflects the messiness of real life. But I had expected at least to find the novel revolving around a central political question -- must Cassie sing the hated song? Or will she be allowed to sit out? Will this lead to other students refusing to sing songs they object to, and will that snowball into some larger exploration of civil liberties?
But no.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a novel that doesn't neatly present a conflict and resolution. But without a central plot, either internal or external, the author has to give the reader better clues to why we should keep reading. Aside from Cassie, I got very little sense of who or what the characters are like, precisely because we only see them through Cassie's eyes in her journal. (I wasn't particularly deft at character development when I was a teenager writing in my diary, either...) When Cassie starts to form a friendship and then more than a friendship with a particular boy, I couldn't remember a thing about him from earlier in the novel, except that he'd been mentioned as another of her classmates that hung out with the misfits. The same went for Cassie's original lunch-table-mates and tormenters (as far as I am concerned, an interchangeable group of shy Christian girls, and aggressive Christian girls and boys, respectively).
Other characters are introduced as if they will be significant, and then never show up to do anything significant, such as the one nice teacher at the school who runs Tolkien and writing club, and the school librarian who offers Cassie a refuge during lunch-time. A big deal is made, late in the novel, about Cassie going to therapy. After describing her first session in detail, her second session is only mentioned (okay, fine, we don't need a play-by-play every time...)...and she never goes again, an entire plot point tossed away when Cassie simply asserts "I was never going there again." This is, I believe, one way genre fiction tends to be stronger than general fiction; you just don't find this kind of non-starter stuff in sci-fi or mysteries.
I did appreciate the realistic way, however, Mandabach handles the reality of things like suicidal thoughts, heavy fictional stories, and parental concern for teenagers. It's a society where parents and educators are held responsible for kids' total well-being -- from predicting the kids who are suicidal or homicidal to just bullies or early drinkers or sex-havers -- and preventing all risky and harmful behavior, while parents and educators don't actually have the power to change the circumstances that make kids feel suicidal or homicidal, or like being drunk; and this translates to protectiveness and overreactions that Cassie's diary keenly reflects. Her teachers and parents can respond to symptoms, but never root causes. When she writes a story that features the main character's suicide, her teacher calls in administrators and parents for what amounts to an intervention. The concern would be comical if it weren't so serious and so stifling. (On a side note: I found Cassie's parents, particularly her lawyer, snappy-quipping dad, absolutely insufferable, a parody of actually cool, supportive parents, who do exist and have intelligent conversations with their children.)
Veganism is a feature of Cassie's character that fits both her sensitivity to suffering and her connection to the natural world. With her love for vinyl records and disdain for most later technologies (this is actually a teenager who does not watch TV), she seems well on her way to primitive anarchism. While Mandabach gets a lot of things right about being vegan and living your life -- Cassie orders a cheese-less pizza when she's out with her friends, she buys her first make-up only after learning it's all vegan -- some of it felt out-of-step. Early in the novel, she describes her family's cabin and her father and brother fishing. I kept waiting for her vegan's-eye-view of the subject, but instead we first get a romantic description of her dad whispering to the fish as he catches-and-releases. Later, Cassie describes how, the year she was first vegan, she ruined the annual fishing trip by throwing a stone to scare the fish away right as her brother cast. After a physical fight between the siblings, Dad decided to cut the trip short: "No fish will bleed this day." But that's all we get. Whatever easy or uneasy truce Cassie reached with her family about fishing since then (because the other members of the family do continue to fish and Cassie presumably objects), this is left unsaid. It would have only taken another sentence or two, but Mandabach never re-visits it. Either it didn't seem important to the author (who is not vegan, but does love fishing...) or he believed he'd already pushed his non-vegan audience far enough into animal rights territory. This is clearly not the story he wants to tell, or where his interests lie.
A worthy effort, with some very keen moments, but like many real diaries that get published, this one could have used some more editing.
May 1, 2022
Reminded me way too much of my angsty teenage self - except I wasn't as cool and/or rebellious as the Brian Mandabach's creation!
January 15, 2015
This book annoyed me so much, for a variety of reasons. First of all, having gone to a conservative middle school, I can completely understand the annoyance with the way her classmates cannot accept science. But this was the end of where I could identify with her problems. One of my main annoyances? THE STORY HAD NO PLOT. It was merely her diary, with a lack of an ending.
But anyway, her character drove me absolutely crazy. She first of all refuses to sing Proud to be an American, which is okay in itself, yet she decides to resolve this issue by just standing there and not singing, as opposed to discussing this with her teacher. Eventually her teacher gets mad at her, and she sasses him. it is so hard for me to respect her lack of singing when she will not understand why people get mad at her. Her teacher isn't mad about her feelings, he's mad that she WON'T SING!!
Well, this leads to her defying the whole system, just because its suddenly fun or something.I find her nonconformity so so so annoying, since she seems to do it NOT because of actual beliefs but because it pisses people off.
The next worse part of it is that her parents put up with her shaving her head on the spur of the moment, drinking alcohol, purposefully flunking her standardized tests, and basically being a younger female, more annoying Holden caulfield.
And then there was her depression. I have had depression, and something about hers didn't ring true at all. I can't place it, but it did not seem accurate in my opinion.
Overall, she wanted so much to be an adult, yet i found her the most immature narrator i had ever read.
Please, please, save yourself and stay away from this book.
But anyway, her character drove me absolutely crazy. She first of all refuses to sing Proud to be an American, which is okay in itself, yet she decides to resolve this issue by just standing there and not singing, as opposed to discussing this with her teacher. Eventually her teacher gets mad at her, and she sasses him. it is so hard for me to respect her lack of singing when she will not understand why people get mad at her. Her teacher isn't mad about her feelings, he's mad that she WON'T SING!!
Well, this leads to her defying the whole system, just because its suddenly fun or something.I find her nonconformity so so so annoying, since she seems to do it NOT because of actual beliefs but because it pisses people off.
The next worse part of it is that her parents put up with her shaving her head on the spur of the moment, drinking alcohol, purposefully flunking her standardized tests, and basically being a younger female, more annoying Holden caulfield.
And then there was her depression. I have had depression, and something about hers didn't ring true at all. I can't place it, but it did not seem accurate in my opinion.
Overall, she wanted so much to be an adult, yet i found her the most immature narrator i had ever read.
Please, please, save yourself and stay away from this book.
March 5, 2013
This has to be one of my favorite books of all time. I have read it three times to date, though I do not yet own it.
My first time reading it, I was in sixth grade and I was in a bad, bad place. I was bullied by my entire class and I could connect with fourteen-year-old non-conformist, vegan Cassie as I was the sole vegetarian. I could connect because even when my parents told administration about the problems I was having with people in my grade, they did nothing about it.
My second time reading it was the summer before eighth grade; I wanted to see how much I had changed between my first time reading it and when I was actually the same age as the character. Now, seventh grade I had switched to a conservative Christian school, and was beginning my second year there. That second re-reading had me ready for school. Then, when I read the book during 8th grade year, I once again connected with Cassie Sullivan. We were both liberals in a conservative area. Nonconformists with conformists. Kids whose life experiences had them more independent than most their age.
This book is one for all to read - it'll take you on an emotional roller coaster. Maybe it'll make you think twice about how you treat people. Either way, I highly recommend this book for parents with kids who are bullied or parents with children in junior high. This is at the top of my list of books that changed my life, right with Perks.
My first time reading it, I was in sixth grade and I was in a bad, bad place. I was bullied by my entire class and I could connect with fourteen-year-old non-conformist, vegan Cassie as I was the sole vegetarian. I could connect because even when my parents told administration about the problems I was having with people in my grade, they did nothing about it.
My second time reading it was the summer before eighth grade; I wanted to see how much I had changed between my first time reading it and when I was actually the same age as the character. Now, seventh grade I had switched to a conservative Christian school, and was beginning my second year there. That second re-reading had me ready for school. Then, when I read the book during 8th grade year, I once again connected with Cassie Sullivan. We were both liberals in a conservative area. Nonconformists with conformists. Kids whose life experiences had them more independent than most their age.
This book is one for all to read - it'll take you on an emotional roller coaster. Maybe it'll make you think twice about how you treat people. Either way, I highly recommend this book for parents with kids who are bullied or parents with children in junior high. This is at the top of my list of books that changed my life, right with Perks.
April 26, 2010
I have a cousin. Actually, I have about 100. (We're Irish Catholic. Or, at least, my grandparents are so they had a lot of kids and a lot of their kids are so... whatever. Forget it.) But I have one cousin who I'm very close to. I mentioned her in my review of Mists of Avalon.
So Erin is kind of an enigma. I've come across two things that make me think "Wow, this is exactly Erin," in my entire life. TWO. One was the book The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Erin is a lot like Bindy, but less obnoxious. Actually, I liked Bindy, but most people wouldn't. Anyway, point, moot, you get the picture. The other thing was this book.
Cassie reminds me a lot of myself, too. We share a lot of the same political views and mindsets, and the ways we talk. But it was the section where Cassie is talking about the conversations they have in her family, I was like, "WOAH. I think Erin has said this before."
I really, really loved this book. It's already a part of me, and the first time I read it was a week ago. Usually it takes a couple months for a really, really great book to become a part of me. This was just... we need more books like this. YO! Agents, authors and editors! Take note.
So, if you like me, like my cousin, or just like awesome books about how our society doesn't accept the truly great people, read this.
So Erin is kind of an enigma. I've come across two things that make me think "Wow, this is exactly Erin," in my entire life. TWO. One was the book The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Erin is a lot like Bindy, but less obnoxious. Actually, I liked Bindy, but most people wouldn't. Anyway, point, moot, you get the picture. The other thing was this book.
Cassie reminds me a lot of myself, too. We share a lot of the same political views and mindsets, and the ways we talk. But it was the section where Cassie is talking about the conversations they have in her family, I was like, "WOAH. I think Erin has said this before."
I really, really loved this book. It's already a part of me, and the first time I read it was a week ago. Usually it takes a couple months for a really, really great book to become a part of me. This was just... we need more books like this. YO! Agents, authors and editors! Take note.
So, if you like me, like my cousin, or just like awesome books about how our society doesn't accept the truly great people, read this.
July 9, 2010
This book really rubbed off on me the wrong way, initially - having a subplot involving religious zealots and the evolution/creationism "debate" sounded too much like a half dozen other books I had read over the last few months prior, but the end result was something a lot deeper, with some memorable scenes and a protagonist you can't help but sympathize with regardless of your feelings toward her or her beliefs. That's the hallmark of good storytelling for me, honestly.
July 20, 2012
I'm from the Twin Cities. Show me a public school in real life where the liberal, Bush-administration-and-church-questioning girl is the oddball outcast, and I'll turn back time and go there instead for a change of pace. I just couldn't swallow that premise when my experience with teens has been that they're all like her. It was also way too long. That said, she was a fairly likable character, and it held my interest to the end.
August 19, 2012
I believe this was recommended in a bullying webinar. The author nailed that dynamic and did a pretty good job making this diary of a fourteen year old seem real, as in real random and rambling and self-conscious and pretentious. But I don't have to like the protagonist to like the book. I liked this one enough till the ending, which was a copout.
August 7, 2008
Yet another teen coming of age novel. okay story but wasn't exactly thrilled with the ending..
February 23, 2009
This book is great. I couldn't stop turning the pages. I loved to read it and just really felt like I was there as Cassie lived.
Want to read
July 7, 2011Recommended by Penny Kittle in the Centurions of 2011 group
March 26, 2016
DNF
This was just........ If you have read 250 pages of a 400 page book and still don't know what it's actually about and worst of all couldn't care less it's time too give up
This was just........ If you have read 250 pages of a 400 page book and still don't know what it's actually about and worst of all couldn't care less it's time too give up
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews