The Loser's Guide to Love and Life (A.E. Cannon, June 2008)Teen lit is so easy to read between journal articles, and I'm afraid I won't be able to get into adult lit for a while. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'm not familiar with the author's other work, but she's won some impressive YA awards. The book is pretty entertaining. It focuses on four teens, but I'd say that Ed is the main character. He works at a video store and doesn't have his own name tag yet, so he wears one left behind by a former employee named Sergio. You see where this is going, right? So a cute girl comes into the store and thinks his name is Sergio. Ed takes the opportunity to create a suave alter ego and doesn't correct her. It kinds of reminds me of John/Giovanni in Hard Love, not that the situations or stories are the same.
The novel is made up of alternating chapters from the four characters' persepectives. Ed and Scout, his best female friend, get first person narratives. Quark, Ed's next-door neighbor and other best friend writes in his lab manual, and Ellie, Ed's love interest, writes letters to her family and mentally composes unsent emails to her ex-boyfriend. I'm all about the epistolary device, but in this case, Quark and Ellie are less developed characters because of it. I'm also not a huge fan of shifting first-person narratives. It seems cheap and easy, instead of letting the reader see the characters through the eyes of the narrator, whether omniscient or a protagonist.
So, this one was okay, and a decent way to spend a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday, but it probably won't stick with me like some of the better YA fiction I've found.
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