KLG 2008-09-18

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

This book was so fun to read. The author did a great job describing her characters and keeping her readers entertained. I laughed out loud so many times that I was turning heads at my son's soccer practice! Not only did I enjoy this book, but my daughter loved it as well. It was a great story about the trials and tribulations of those super-sensitive teenage years.

Caligirl_08 2008-07-20

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

I finished reading the book finally (it's been sitting here for over a year, I'd bought it out of morbid curiosity last year when the scandal had just broken out but then just hadn't even felt like reading it.) So I rushed on here to give it the horrible review that it deserves and see that over 70 people have already beaten me to it, so instead of reiterating what creeps i think the author and her publishing company are for a) plagiarizing - stealing from other authors! and b) deceiving us readers by trying to feed us stolen goods!, i'm just going to do a straight review of the book instead, pretending that i have no idea there was any plagiarism involved:

Okay the book was written by a 16-17 year old girl and let's pretend she received no help at all. it's petty impressive that someone so young could string that many words and sentences together into a cohesive pattern and create a book out of it, so she deserves one star for that.

But guess what? all you need to do is go on fictionpress.com and you will find thousands of "books" written by teenagers even younger than the author. and yet this author was so smart and resourceful that not only did she get her fictionpress.com-worthy pile of garbage published, she also got triple figures, a movie deal and a free ride into harvard! she deserves another star just for that.

the main thing i liked about the book was that it starred an indian girl but then i hated it because she was completely whitewashed, her love interest was white and all her indian culture was either marginalized, trivialized or worse, MADE FUN OF. the parents were basically cartoon characters. the whole premise of the book was idiotic. the only reason the love interest liked the main character was because the author wrote it like that. in typical fictionpress.com fashion the love interest was liked by the 'most popular girl in school' who just so happened to be an uber-beyotch and hate the main character.

it was just really a very immature book, none of the characters were really fleshed out beyond the stereotypical archetypes they were meant to represent. the plot was very predictable. it really makes me sad that an admissions counselor read this book and thought it would be a great idea to let the author into their school. if only i had had the insight to put all my silly teenage fantasies on paper, maybe i could have gone to harvard too!

i really shouldn't be giving this book two stars. i threw it in the trash and i NEVER throw books in the trash. the only reason i give it 2 stars is because the kid was 17 and i kinda feel bad for her. she was just a kid, alloy should have known better.

Kate 2008-01-07

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

I am a high school senior and happened to pick this book up at the library that afternoon after I had sent my college applications in. I thought it would be the perfect beach book for my coming trip. I even maintained hope far longer than I should have. The bottom line is that it is not believable. I think that the very basic plot line had a ton of potential and fell flat. This twists and turns of this story have been told too many times (Mean Girls). I kept hoping that in the end Opal would realize more directly that what her and her parents thought was a life, was actually far from it. I hate that there was the love piece thrown in about Sean- too cliché. The HBz have been done and are no longer amusing or interesting. Maybe Harvard does things differently but from what I know of my own college application process, if you decide not to apply early, you don't get another interview which then takes away the point of the book. I would love to read this book if it was well written and possibly of memoir. Every high school seniors can relate to a lot of this book, but that parts that we can't relate to are too vast and ruin it. As I told my dad about the book he asked me if in the end she decided she didn't need Harvard- I would enjoy reading that book.

fan 2007-08-04

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

I read this book and intended to base my review on its contents alone, not the controversy. That's been played out enough.

I completely expected to hate it, but I didn't. I didn't particularly love it either. There were so many things in this book that were either improbable, impossible or bore a resemblence to every piece of teen lit/chick lit ever written. It was exactly like Mean Girls, except not as clever.

I haven't been a teenager for a while now, but none of it really rang true. How did Opal get so smart with all of fashion labels all of the sudden? And the ones she wears, like Moschino, are not ones girls her age would wear. Or even know about. Some of the other ones just seem really adult and not something a high school senior whould wear.

The dialogues were kind of stupid, contrived and sounded unnatural. It played into so many stereotypes. The popular girls are always bitches, the nerds are always nice and college is this great heaven away from high school. I found when I went to college, it really started getting complicated, but that wasn't the message in this book.

The only thing I liked were Opal's interactions with Sean. Those seemed like the most truthful. It seemed like there was a good book in there somewhere, struggling to get out.

I get it two stars because she at least tried. I could have easily gone off on her for the plagarizing, but like I said, that's already been done. Plagarism or not, I found this book contrived, unoriginal and horribly cliched.

A. Kapoor 2007-07-07

0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

This book reminded me so much of the movie 'Mean Girls' The popular girls are the Haute Bitchez instead of the Plastics and the main plot being the whole climbing up the social ladder, only to come falling down. Some parts of the book made me cringe as I read them, especially when the parents were involved in Opal's college aspirations and how ridicule far they were willing to go to get her into Harvard.

However, some parts of the novel made me reflect on my own life as a Indian-American college student--whose parents just like Opal's have tried to live their lives vicariously through me. I really enjoyed the chapter when she visits Harvard and that feeling of college being the stepping stone into a whole new world. I remember feeling the same exact things during my freshman year as I met new and exciting people who I had never had contact before.

To keep things short, if your parents have ever tried to force you to do anything (college, marriage, life in general) you should read this book. Who knows, it may give you a new perspective on things.