Slacks for Ella Funt

This is a pretty typical YA romance, told in the voices of the boy and the girl. The same sort of thing was done much better in Nick and Norah’s Inifnite Playlist (by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan). Besides for the romance, there’s not a whole lot going on in this book, besides for subplots about applying for college, which I didn’t find very interesting (maybe because I’m too old).

Colasanti drops in a lot of pop culture references to try to make herself and the characters look cool. Unfortunately, while some (John Cusack in Say Anything) are actually good, some aren’t (Dave Matthews Band) and the bad ones just make the characters seem lame. I think in books, it’s better to just have fictional bands, like Cohn and Levithan did in Nick and Norah and Sarah Dessen does in her books. Then the characters can seem interested in music without the author having to worry about whether the bands mentioned are cool.