Status Updates From Paperback Crush: The Totall...

Hey, Marissa and Violet were excellent counsellors! Their kids adored them, and as importantly, they tailored their activities to the individual kids’ likes - hikes and craft stuff for Marissa’s, makeup and hair for Vi’s. I am starting to suspect the author has not read a lot of these books. (I read this one last summer, not for the first time.)

I’m pretty sure Mary Anne and Too Many Boys was book #34, not #42. I really do have a weird memory. #42 was Jessi and the Dance School Phantom, which I liked because it was a) Jessi and b) longer than most of them (but sadly did not involve any ghosts).

The only books Ms Moss actually praises are “gritty” ones. I honestly don’t know why she didn’t just write about those.

“Really, we’re the clowns for having bought this stuff, right? Am I right?”

Sometimes the feel of a book can be summed up in one sentence. This makes me rather sad.

I don’t get the author of this book, I really don’t. She looks down at books like Sweet Valley for being too dramatic and unrealistic, and looks down at other books for being too realistic and mundane and focusing on problems that are barely problems, or that she considers unimportant. Does she just not like teenagers? Or people in general?

…oh. Maybe I liked Sweet Valley because my life was genuinely dramatic, so it doesn’t read as soap opera levels of insane to me. I never considered that before.