55 Books in a Year: Book #38 Catching Jordan

Most of this review has been pieced together from a conversation in YA Reads for Teachers (and Any Other Adults) on Goodreads. This month the new-ish book I wanted to read Catching Jordan won the nomination which means I lead the discussion. This book is wonderful to moderate. Please know all the words below are mine. I figured since I said them to begin with I could rearrange them any way I liked.

Before I go off on a "I love this book so much that I want to marry it and have its babies" tangent...I want you to know that this book is exactly what I expected and in no way what I thought it was going to be at all!

Here's what I expected

1. A book about football

2. A book that highlighted football games and talked about aspects of the game I didn't understand

3. A romantic comedy

What I didn't expect

1. The subtle commentary about how boys treat girls in sports

2. The reason Jordan chose the boy she chose

3. What gets me is the sex scene...I wasn't even allowed to lock my bedroom door when I was alone and my mother would have flipped had she caught me in my room with a boy...and, she, like Jordan's mother, would have known what was going on. In some ways jordan's parents are 'too cool' and 'hip'.

4. All the f-bombs...even if I know that kids cuss that much when grown-ups aren't around (what I hear in the hall is sometimes astounding) and even if I know that as Jordan matures there seems to be less cussing and over-all 'puffing' up...wow lots of f-bombs

Jordan is a girl who at first seems pretty strong-willed and bad -a, but has actually spent her life trying to please others...her parents, her coach, her best-friend and the list goes on. And, although she has incredible talent as a football player, she still doesn't feel confident enough around girls her age to consider them friends.  It is her best friend that helps her find the balance and, although he is a boy, he is the one who seems to have her best interest at heart. If only he could stop sleeping around and partying enough to get through to her. 

Kenneally did a great job of showing us how easy it is to be a girl in a boy sport in high school compared to the college-level...a sad, but believable approach. Jordan must figure out who she is. She must decide whether she's a college football player (one that's on the bench or one that plays) or a girl who loves her best friend or a girl who loves someone who treats her with kid gloves or a daughter who needs her father's approval. I think this book wonderful shows how our high school dreams morf and change and it shows how we can choose to accept this change or we can find against it our whole lives. In one of those realities we'd have an incredibly unhappy future.

Feel free to discuss...

Oh, and here's the author's website if you're interested:

http://mirandakenneally.com/

Her 25 things is pretty awesome!

Want to contribute to the conversation? Want to read and discuss why YA books with your adult brain? Come join us!

55 Books in a Year: Book #26 Pinch Hit

OK, so Pinch Hit is one of those books that I probably would not have picked up and read on my own, but I won it at YA Reads for Teachers (And Other Adults) and the rules of winning are that you read and post.

So, I read it, and let me tell you I read it in May at the end of the school year with a million other things going on...it wasn't really doing it for me. Frankly, I'm not sure if I do middle grade books for middle grade kids very well. But, I kept going Sam in one chapter and Trevor in another. I found that, if I stopped being 'adult' about it, I was beginning to enjoy the cliffhanger end to each chapter and then starting the next chapter up with the other character so a person might read 4 or 5 chapters before they realized it. Perfect for reluctant readers (OK, so I totally/all the way didn't stop being 'adult' about it).

This book is about Sam, an All-American baseball player and Trevor, a prissy (not because he wants to be, but because his mom makes him) Hollywood mega-star. Trevor wants to play real baseball more than anything and Sam wants his father's horror film script green-lighted (or, is that green-lit?). After Trevor realizes that he and Sam look about 99% identical, they, with the help of Trevor's female co-star, switch places. There are parts were things get a little hairy...Sam reads/Trevor does not, Sam knows Shakespeare/Trevor does not, Sam can switch it/Trevor...and so on, but for the most part the grown-ups don't get it. Things go rather well until the boys figure out that they are, in fact, real twins and Sam uses Trevor's star power to find their real mother.

Who can the boys trust? Will Trevor be good enough to fool the coach and scouts? Will Sam be able to act? These are all things that will keep kids on their toes and there's just enough sports to make it interesting and just enough romance to entice all kids to want to read it. I got hooked and got to the end wanting more, I'm pretty sure most kids will too.

This book is like the Prince and the Pauper meets The Whipping Boy, I think it would make a cute Disney movie starring a set of adorable twins...I guess the Sprouse twins from The Suite Life of Zach and Cody are too old aren't they?

55 Books in a Year: Book #3 Geek Girls Unite, How Fangirls, Bookworms, Indie Chicks, and Other Misfits are Taking Over the World

I am a geek. I've embraced that fact from the first day I went to visit my grandfather and he told me stories about WWII and his early life in PA. While other kids were reading Amelia Bedelia (and, I read her too!), I was reading about fighter jets and pilots and Tuskegee Airmen...collecting WWII stories was my first foray into geekdom.

Fast forward to a few years later, which you can read all about here, I began an adventure in SF. I've collected books, movies and actors (yes, if you keep stats on actors on paper like IMBD, in 1985, before said website was even thought up and before the interwebs were created for mass use, you are, in fact, collecting actors), I collected dolls...er action figures (I still have my Yoda action figure, no you may not buy it from me) and I still have my Mulder and Scully Barbies (no you may not have those either!), rocks and posters. Starting my adult years I began to collect recipes and glassware. I think that it is being a collector that makes any person a geek. I don't think that Leslie Simon, author of Geek Girls Unite, disagrees at all.

The book is broken up into chapters focusing on various types of 'geeks’ (fangirl, literary, film, music, funny girl, domestic and miscellaneous) and each of those sections follows the same format: a quiz (where the answers are always 'C'...don't know why that is), a character sketch, descriptions of famous geeks of that ‘genre’, ‘frenemies’ (which is an hilarious look at those in that particular community that give the rest a bad name...) and concludes with ‘the perfect match for’ section. It's this last part that cracks me up the most, it's like Geek girls meet Cosmo mag and my friends and I had such a fun time checking off the list and then adding our own.

I like how Simon uses the introduction to make sure that we understand that while she may poke fun at this or that and that while we may do that too, we are all in this together. She says

It's time for us to reclaim the connotations of being a "geek" and hold tight to the term as a source of pride and distinction. In other words, embrace your quirkiness! Celebrate your idiosyncrasies! There is power in your geekiness! Trust.

And...

Here's the most important thing, though: just because our passions aren't the same," that doesn't mean we aren't united in our geeky affection for what ever it is that makes us happy--even if it feels like society sometimes pits us against one another. ...being a geek should unite--not divide--us. If one good thing comes out of this book, it will be that you get to know your geeky sisters (and cousins) so you can recognize these fabulous ladies when you see them, start a conversation, and realize that our differences are actually what bring us closer together.

I remembered the above when she defined, with a little bit of sass, but all truisms, the terms that I have used to refer to myself (geek, nerd, dork, dweeb, weirdo) and when, on more than one occasion, I found myself falling into the 'frenemies' category. We, even those of us who only scratch the surface of someone else's obsession, must love each other and unite in order to conquer the world.

Geek Girls Unite is just informative enough that teenager girls, who feel their inner geek, but can't find an outlet, can learn more and identify with others and those of us who already know what we are can laugh in delight. I mean I have at one time or another been totally in love with David Tennant (my Fangirl Geek Girlness), James Franco (my Literary Geek Girlness), Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mark Ruffalo (my Film Geek Girlness), Jack White (my Music Geek Girlness), Andy Samberg (my Funny-Girl Geek Girlness)...and, I've crushed on Hungry Girl, Anthony Bourdain, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert and John Stewart. I liked that Simon talks about Athletic Geek Girl as a person who doesn't necessarily play or want to play sports (it goes back to that collecting thing I mentioned earlier) so I felt comfortable about falling into this category as well. 

This book is part encyclopedia, part humor, part commentary, part major to-do list (as in I must now watch _____ or create a mix-CD of ________, why haven't I done that before?) and definitely a call to arms to all geek girls out there.

It is, after all, "a geek's world; everyone else is just living in it."

5 Stars

This book isn't really 280 pages on the Nook...seriously like 70 pages are footnotes. Each footnote gets its own page so you can click back and forth effortlessly. I'd like to also note that this book is glitchy moving from the last page of a chapter to the first page of the next one...not really sure what that's about, but I'm sure it can be fixed and I will wait to go to B&N before archiving and unarchiving et cetera, I have an irrational fear of deleting things that I shouldn't!

Six Word Saturday #25

My life in six words
Team from Missouri wins World Series!

Even if I only watched 2 of the 7 games, and about 4 regular season games, I still think that's pretty darn cool!

Want to play along? All that's necessary to participate is to describe your life (or something) in a phrase using just six words. For more information, try clicking here. Feel free to explain or not explain. Add an image, a video, a song, nothing. The full list and linky can be found here. And, here's where I found it.