tiny pink books

How To Be Popular by Meg Cabot
Harper Teen, 2008

I actually read this a few months ago and promptly forgot everything about it.  How To Be Popular is a standard, disposable piece of YA fluff.  It’s simple, it’s quick, and overall, it’s enjoyable if you have no expectations of reading something fantastic (or even memorable, in this case).

How To Be Popular is about Steph Landry, an average, yet lovable highschooler in a small town.  Although she is far from friendless, she is not at all popular, mostly due to an embarrassing junior high school incident that the queen bee of the school will never let Steph live down.   Basically, the story revolves around Steph, who finds a self help book about how to be popular, trying to change her status while facing a few other friend and family situations.

There’s nothing special abotu How To Be Popular, yet it is exactly what it should be–fun, light-hearted, and sugary.  The characters in this book are nice teenagers with nice, easy to solve problems, which is why I think it would be a good tween book (as opposed to full on teens, who would probably snicker at poor little Steph and her popularity problems).  Readers looking for substance should go elsewhere, but for readers seeking tween fluff, How To Be Popular will fit the bill.

King Dork by Frank Portman
Delacorte Press, 2006.

Frank Portman, of the Mr. T Experience (a band fondly familiar to me from my own high school days!), is the author of King Dork, an entertaining and eerily familiar YA novel.  King Dork is Tom, also known as Chi-Mo or Moe, due to an unfortunate and mean spirited nicknaming incident.  A self deprecating social outcast, Chi-Mo gives us a humorous and, at least for me, all too familiar portrait of the social hell that is high school as he navigates through friendship, rock bands, girls, The Catcher in the Rye, his late father’s past, and his family life.  From the rigidly defined cliques, the mean spirited psychological torture from “normal people,” and the abusive vice principal, King Dork rang true, almost frighteningly so, to my own high school world.

Tom’s voice is what works most in King Dork.  Perhaps it is because I feel like I knew him (or was the female equivalent of him?), but his wit and intelligence ring through every sentence of this book.  While it is short on actual plot at times, the book never goes stale because the voice brings a certain kind of truthful humor that keeps the pages turning.

Although those seeking action or distinct plot movement will be disappointed, King Dork is a great book for YA readers who want emotion cut with lots humor.  John Green fans might find King Dork to be suitable followup.  Social misfits (and former social misfits) will find truth and amusement in Tom’s snarky observations.  This book is YA and contains a number of references to sex and drugs, though none are very explicit, making it a little more appropriate for older young adults.