This book was published in 2001. I was in fourth grade, still being a brat to my friends--namely Astrid, who I teased relentlessly over a boy we dubbed Warthog. It boggles my mind that I'm reading this book 13 years after it first came out, and it still feels as fresh as if I were still hunkered down in the trenches of high school.
I'm pretty sure I stumbled across this book in the library at some point during my adolescence, but I snubbed my nose at both the title and the cover art. Even now, I still probably wouldn't be caught in public reading a book with this cover. I distinctly remember seeing this book in Gov. J's house one day (a long long time ago) and thought to myself, Gross. The term "sloppy firsts" conjured all sorts of images of wet slobbering macking that I had zero interest in--which in retrospect was probably a wise decision, because although I read a lot of fiction books from the grown-up section back then, I was completely naive and oblivious about sex and I probably would have been skuzzed out by all the hook-up culture going on in this book. You see, unlike the book's protagonist Jessica Darling who seems to think everyone is boning everybody in high school, I used to think that, other than the blonde cheerleader in my World Cultures class who used to talk about her escapades all the time, people my age just didn't do these things. Cue a rude awakening a few years later.
It's kind of hard to summarize this book and make it sound interesting. It fits right under the slice-of-life category--which means it could have been really boring if executed poorly. Jessica Darling is a straight-A sophomore in a suburban New Jersey high school. She desperately misses her best friend Hope who moved to Nashville, secretly hates her friends whom she's dubbed the "Clueless Crew," has the usual family problems, crushes on a senior athlete whom she's only spoken to once, and has something weird going on with Marcus Flutie, a mysterious loner dude with a dubious reputation that precedes him.
But fortunately, the execution of this book was spot-on. It was so entertaining that I zipped through this in approximately three hours while multi-tasking. Jessica Darling's snarky commentary is a riot, and though she can get quite judgmental at times, to me she's kind of like a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet where those flaws just make her more endearing. If I had been friends with her in high school, we probably would have been smack-talking about annoying people all the time. Though high school hadn't been all fun-and-games for me, I'd say that I generally had a good time. I wasn't a social pariah. I had a solid group of friends that would occasionally talk smack about one another, but reading about Jessica and the Clueless Crew made me just a teensy bit nostalgic for the days when Rogue and I would spend every lunch break swooning over our fictional bad boys, complaining about the lameness of our lives and how we'd both end up at the same nursing home, and discussing the latest brouhaha surrounding the star players of high school drama (always the same dramatic people).
Random tidbit that might be categorized under TMI (you've been forewarned)--whenever Jessica would talk about her problems with amenorrhea (aka her menstrual cycle going on strike due to stress), I would mentally laugh at the irony of me reading this book when last night I woke up at 4 am because my monthly uterine rebellion was giving me such shitty sleep. And apparently I was having half-lucid nightmares about birds exploding into splatters of blood before I finally headed for the bathroom. Don't ask.
Also, no review of this book is complete without mention of Marcus Flutie. I've heard a lot about this boy, especially from FYA which has once dubbed him the "Mr. Darcy of YA." Well, I've only read the first book, so I don't really know if he clinches that title later in the series or what, but he's an intriguing one, I'll give him that. The thing is, Jessica's interactions with him are fairly sparse in this book--so there weren't any major moments that got me all riled up about shipping them. But because he showed up so infrequently, I always immediately perked up whenever he made an appearance--because let's face it, the two of them do have chemistry.
The cliffhanger at the end with Marcus is almost enough to make me scope out for the second book. But I probably won't read it--at least not any time soon. I scoped out some Goodreads reviews, and when I heard that Jessica gets more whiny, more obsessed with sex, and also stubbornly refuses to reconcile with Marcus, I thought---Ughhh. She was already gracefully balancing the fine line between being snarky and complaining about everything, and I'd rather not see that line crossed. Also, FYA favorably compared Jessica Darling to Anne Shirley, which I totally agree with, but if I have to put up with Jessica Darling snubbing Marcus Flutie the way Anne Shirley did to my precious Gilbert Blythe, there will be sad unhealthy days for my blood pressure.
I'd probably reread this book again though, just to savor the hilarious pieces of commentary. Maybe it's better not to tarnish a good memory by reading a less-than-sparkling sequel? We'll see.
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