Book Review: Sloppy Firsts (Jessica Darling #1)

Title: Sloppy Firsts (Jessica Darling, #1)
Author: Megan McCafferty
Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 2001
Page total: 280 pages
Date read: March 30th, 2010
Genre(s): Young Adult; Chick-lit

Reviewed by Ginny

Tonight I’ve been thinking about the mosaic Hope gave me the night she U-hauled ass out of Pineville. I wasn’t supposed to open it until my birthday, but I couldn’t wait.

I’ve been toying with the idea about writing a review of this book for quite a long time, but every time I tried, I came up with nothing.
I know what you’re going through your head. Why? What’s the big deal of writing a review? Just write down what you liked / didn’t like and pep it up with some quotes and done!

It just doesn't work for me. For me, writing a review has a great meaning. I just don’t write down what comes to my mind at that moment and deal with it. Not because I want to impress everybody with my writing but rather because I know that people are going to actually read what I wrote. My thoughts might, no matter how little, influence them. I have to be especially careful with something most people don’t know about. Their opinion isn’t formed yet - they might form their own opinion based on what they read, i.e. what I write. See what I mean?

I haven’t been able to come up with an okay-sounding review because Sloppy Firsts is a very unique novel. And by unique I don’t mean the cover, the format, or the author’s creativity of creating some mind-blowing plot. By unique I mean the main character, Jessica Darling. I know that everybody is supposed to be unique, and that most authors manage to create unique characters, but Jessica is the most unique character I’ve encountered in my life (which is not that long).

This book is written from Jessica’s point of view, so we get to hear her most private, most intimate and also most honest and unique thoughts. I’d never thought that there could be teenagers like her. Not that the author was a teenager when she wrote the novel, mind you.
Jessica is smart (like really smart), observant, sarcastic, funny and somehow different from normal teenagers. But I’d rather not say how and why I’d liked it exactly because I want you to have the chance to form your own opinion. I don’t want to interrupt yours with mine.
The plot is simple, actually: Her best friend Hope leaves the tiny hometown with her family. Jessica is devastated, now that the only person she could really communicate with is gone. How is she supposed to deal with the boy- and shopping-crazy girls at school, her dad’s obsession with her track meets, her mother salivating over her big sister’s wedding, and her nonexistent love life? And how is she supposed to feel about Marcus Flutie, the intelligent and mysterious “Dreg” who works his way into her heart?
It’s Jessica’s personality that makes this book so unique. Try it.

Quotes (can’t find better quotes right now!):

I got the Scholar Athlete Award. My GPA has risen to 99.66. The crazy thing is, the higher my GPA gets, the more I realize that high school is useless. I’m serious. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of this country is that I’m in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I’m a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the first day of my last period.
I'm not exactly celebrating.
[...]
Oh, the irony. I'm decades ahead of my classmates psychologically. Physically, however, I'm a goddamn kindergartner.