Book Review: Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols

Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Raise your hand if you were a band nerd! Me!

Okay, now, raise your hand if being a band nerd was pretty awesome at your school…Me!

Last one. Raise your hand if the words “band bus” bring back any memories…*totally blushing*…Me!

Okay, now, (I know, I said last one, but I lied) picture Port St. Joe, Florida. There. You have your setting (it’s actually not Port St. Joe, but for my locals, this will be our closest spot for visual reference).

Well, you might like this book for a quick and fun teen romance plus a trip down memory lane. It was a really entertaining weekend read! Since I grew up on the Georgia/Florida state line and I was in the drum line (okay, pit percussion for full transparency, but I still had to sit with drum line on the bus and in the stands)…and know what it’s like to date, break up with and still have to spend an entire semester beside said guys, this story was completely relatable to me! Oh, lawd! I think this is probably the only reason why I liked it. The whole percussion aspect.

Tia, the youngest of 4 sisters and the only one still at home, has a fear of commitment, based on her older sisters’ experiences. She has sworn off ever having a boyfriend, but is a-okay with hooking up. She has a reputation; she doesn’t really care; apparently no one else really does either.
Enter Will, the newbie from Minnesota, complete with accent. He pseudo-hooks up with a semi-drunk Tia the first night he’s in town. The chemistry is hot and gets even hotter when they find themselves marching next to each other on the drum line in the local high school band.

Then, after a whole 2 days at school and 4 days of band camp (let me just say here that our percussionists had like…3 weeks of band camp. I kid you not. Also, mid-day breaks were dangerous…), they are voted Biggest Flirts. The funniest part of the entire book was the band director constantly shouting for “Mr. Matthews, take your hands off of Ms. Cruz!”

For a short and fun book, I got what I wanted out of the character arcs. I would’ve loved to know even more about Will and Tia’s friends. The only other character with a significant arc is Tia’s constant “friend with bennies,” Sawyer. Even with his character, though, I only got two or three layers.

Now, I understand the chemistry and the fast moving flirtations of Will and Tia. They’re hot, sweaty, demanding. There are pheromones flying. Therefore, I’m not going to shout insta-love…just yet. It makes perfect sense for them to want to hook up. Sweaty drummers are hot (okay, they WERE hot when I was in high school. Now that I could practically be their mother, they’re only hot in my memories…because in reality they look like children. Evil, conniving, I-will-ruin-your-daughter’s-virginity type children). There’s even a hierarchy of hotness: Quads, Snares, Bass Line, Cymbals. I’m going to leave pit out. We really just dated the snares. The majorettes dated the quads. The bass line and cymbals were all freshman. No one dated them.

When Tia and Will do hook-up, though, they both drop “I love you” on the very first acci-date. Groan. So, now I can shout insta-love, which took off one star. Could we not have at least waited until football season started and they were cuddled together doing unspeakable things on the band bus? The band bus is really where it’s at, Jennifer Echols! Please…don’t even ask how I know this ; )

I would’ve liked to follow them through football season, maybe even homecoming and then graduation and into drum corps.
We’ll see if there are any follow-ups to finish the story, though to be quite honest, I’m good with leaving them alone for now.
I absolutely adore the cuteness of the cover. So high school and so fun. Kudos to the designer for that jacket.

I dropped the 4th star because, overall, I really didn’t love it. Like it? Certainly. Will I read it again and again and add it my shelf of literary idolatry? No. Will I order it to stock in the shop? Nope. I’ve definitely read other books in the same genre and for the same age group that are better.

For the prudes in the audience, I will tell you that there are a few hot and heavy scenes that involve touching, breasts, and moving past first base. It isn’t extremely graphic and there is no sex. There is sexual discussion, but not so much that it takes over the story. This book is definitely still in the young adult genre instead of the new adult. There are some instances of drug use, including alcohol (though no binge-drinking, drunk driving, etc.), marijuana, and one instance of cigarette use by a teenager (who doesn’t like it).

A great weekend beach read, though, if you like fun and light-hearted, and can get it at a cheap price. You can pre-order this book, any order anything else you can imagine, through the Jones’ Book Store. Read Up to Keep Up!

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An advanced copy of this book was provided to me in exchange for a honest review.

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High School Shenanigans or Why I Went Off the Grid for a Week + Book Review: #scandal

I’ve been involved in this little thing called Life that occasionally happens around these parts. Two productions went off without too much of a hitch (well, one where the leads actually got hitched and the other where the leads pretended to get hitched).

Theatre week can bring out so many emotions, especially in the director, which was my lucky title.

I spent this past week deep in the ire of the theatre at Cairo High School, where my students were finishing up their Spring production of Guys and Dolls. On Monday afternoon, we put together Act I (for the first time…I know, scary). By Friday night, the kids did a pretty jam up job. Was it perfect? Nope. Was I proud? Yep. They came a long, long way in 4 days and all I could ask for was improvement at every rehearsal–that’s what they gave me!

I’ve decided that after many years of working with high schoolers, teaching them, and especially trying to mount a production with them, is like taking a trust fall off of a cliff and hoping (read: praying) they catch you at the bottom. It’s really all up to the students. I can give them costumes, sets, props, make-up and mics, but I can’t learn their lines or songs for them. I can share my passion, but I can only hope to inspire theirs.

So of course, while I’ve got 40+ kids packed into dressing rooms, wings & any other nook and cranny of a backstage space, high school shenanigans were bound to happen. Someone’s boyfriend showed up uninvited and a chivalrous guys from the cast made him leave. Someone’s foot got stomped by a character shoe heel (tell me a show where this doesn’t happen) and her friends tried to “jump” (their word, not mine) the girl whose foot was found in the offending shoe. Phones (read: cameras) were everywhere. God only knows what dressing photos were caught. Curse words were slung from here to Broadway. I had to give tear-inducing speeches about making great memories in the dressing room rather than those they’d rather forget. Awesome. Hugs and kisses, ladies and gentlemen of the cast.

All of this got me thinking about #scandal a pretty fab book about modern-day shenanigans (read, those of kids currently in high school, which are probably pretty tame compared to what would’ve happened if we’d had Facebook, SnapChat and FaceTime in high school).

Written by Sarah Ockler, #scandal is a contemporary YA mystery novel; a cautionary tale about keeping up with your phone lest someone steal it and hack your Facebook account. Also, it has a pretty good message about 1) keeping business to yourself 2) the perils of social networking and 3) labeling is so not meta (read: cool/inducing of good karma points). Also, point 4) if your best friend tells you to go to prom with her “boyfriend,” the same guy you’ve been crushing hard on for 3 years…you probably should say no.

The characters (of which there are many…it is high school, after all…) are well-rounded, though sometimes hard to keep straight. It seems at first that there will be a “token” character to fill every high school stereotype, but once we’re deeper into the pages, we find…well, we find that we, as the reader, are doing exactly what we aren’t supposed to be doing: labeling.

Written from multiple POV’s, we get to see the social networking scandal unfold from different angles. My favorite character, of course, is Miss Demeanor. An alias for a character in the twists and turns of this mystery, Miss Demeanor keeps us up to date on all manners of social scandals and other happenings. Her actual identity and ulterior motive are a complete mystery until the end. Along the way, there are countless pop-culture references from Oprah to Ani Defranco and everything in between. These kept me laughing through the entire book. The downside to these references (and the Facebook postings from Miss D) is that in a few years, it will just be nostalgic to think back on the time of Facebook; surely something else will have taken over and branded us all followers of the anti-christ by then (totally j/k on that, by the way). It may not stand the test of time, or it may come back later and everything will be cool again (think Eleanor and Park and how kids reading it think tape players, mixed tapes and…ah! changing batteries!…is “just so 80’s and cool”….please…make me throw up kids, I LIVED through the 80’s…big bangs, batteries and all). Another downside (I hate that I’m finding these downsides, because honestly, the pop-culture references were my favorite part of the book) is that an older reader may not “get” all of them. Even I (29 Foh evah, ya’ll!) didn’t get one of them until…well, until this week actually (there’s a character nick-named 420…I’m going to let you figure out which slot he fits in). Maybe it’s not age, but the fact that I’m not a stoner…we’ll leave that to dwell on later.

Anyway, back to the book. The scandal is actually pretty crappy for the characters and there were times when I really just wanted to jump through the pages and shake some of those silly high schoolers by the shoulders. Grrrr!!!! GROW UP!!! And then, I remember that they are, in fact, just high schoolers. The book comes out June 17th and before you dismiss it (like SOME people already have) just because there’s a hashtag in the title, let me remind you that this is the very reason to pick it up. Put it on your TBR list NOW!

Here are two more books that I loved to read about high school shenanigans.

Kiss and Make Up, by Katie D. Anderson, is a hilarious novel about a girl, her lipstick and some really, really awesome, like, my absolute favorite ever, pop-culture reference…

 

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..now tell me that didn’t make you laugh.

It’s actually a really cute read that deals with a younger high schooler, bad boyfriends, tough family history and a little tiny bit of magic. You’ll enjoy it.

The next is probably one you’ve already read, especially if you’re a Lauren Oliver fan, which I am (although I will be the first to admit that the Delirium series was not my favorite).

Before I Fall is a YA contemporary novel dealing with some pretty heavy issues. I’ll just give you a synopsis and then tell you that you plus anyone over the age of 14 in your inner circle must read it:

Girl goes to party. Girl leaves party. Girl is in car accident. Girl thinks she’s died in said accident. Girl wakes up. Girl realizes it is the same day. Six times.

Now, I know that this isn’t an original theme, but the way Oliver writes this high schoolers revolving door of emotions is pretty awesome. It’s deep and deals with tough issues, but I think it’s an absolute must read, especially if you’ve got a teen nearby.

So there you go! Enjoy these YA contemporary novels and never stop Reading Up with the Joneses! Don’t forget, you can pre-order #scandal or purchase kindle or bound editions of Kiss and Make Up and Before I Fall in the Jones’ Book Store, up there on your right.