I picked this book up at a thrift store in February 2005. I don't remember if I knew anything about it at the time, or if I just grabbed it because it looked like a chick lit book, which I was (and still am) into. When I go on a thrift store shopping binge, I buy a lot of books just from looking at the covers and with no prior knowledge of the contents. Sometimes you get a loser, sometimes you get a winner. This was definitely a winner.
When I opened this book and started reading a couple of days ago, I didn't bother to read the back cover, or the inside cover flap. I just started reading the book. And learned, to my surprise, that it's a YA book, narrated by a teenage girl in diary form. A genre that I kind of got bored with awhile back, somewhere in the middle of the Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison (which I've never finished - I also never finished the Mates, Dates, and... series by Cathy Hopkins). At that point I immediately did read the back cover and the cover flap, just to confirm to myself that it really is a YA novel.
I got caught up in sixteen-year-old Jessica Darling's world very quickly, however, and am really glad that I gave it a shot. The narration is crisp and amusing and self-deprecating. Even though I'm forty-seven(!), I can still relate in my memory to some of her anxiety about school and boys and a best friend moving away (though in my life it was always me moving away from my best friend).
So now I have to add to my ever growing wish list the rest of this series: Second Helpings; Charmed Thirds; Fourth Comings; and Perfect Fifths. So thank you, Ms. McCafferty!
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