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By the Book: A Novel of Prose and Cons is a high school rom-com targeted towards people who like a.) friendship stories b.) sibling stories c.) a constant, affectionate stream of references to nineteenth-century literature.
...it is me, I am that person, I think I got about 90% of them. (Somehow I've managed to completely escape Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)
The premise: naive, overeducated Mary has just transferred from her tiny inderdisciplinary program for professor's kids to a more traditional high school. After a rocky start when her best-friend-of-convenience from her old school decides to ditch her, she is absorbed into a clique of new friends ...
... who are, despite the skepticism of some of the more high-school-genre-savvy members of Mary's family, in fact genuinely nice and well-meant and interested in being her friends! The main conflict centers around the fact that Mary's adoption into the group comes via her habit of mapping bad high school boyfriends onto bad boyfriends of nineteenth-century literature, and as a result she struggles with feeling like she must remain a Font of Literary Wisdom, especially when the first boy she identified as Bad turns out of course to be both Pretty Cool Actually and Kind Of Into Her.
The boy in question is indeed perfectly sweet and I have no beef with him, but the real heart of the book is very much the story of Mary learning how to model genuine friendship and believe that her new friends group might like her for her own sake and not just because they've all really bought into bibliomancy via Austen.
I'm also very fond of Mary's large array of siblings, who are all involved in their own sub-conflicts. My favorites, of course, are the Cool College Twins who are having lesbian Shakespeare society drama, because I am always going to be here for lesbian Shakespeare society drama, but the sarcastic baby brother is also charming and Mary's changing relationships with all of them as she undergoes her coming-of-age are extremely sweet.
The book overall is really very warm-hearted about all its characters -- even the Mean Former Best Friend plotline is mostly an exploration of how people sometimes grow out of each other and it's really not anybody's fault -- which makes it a very soothing read, especially if you also happen to find it soothing to play the game of Name That Brit-Lit Plot Point every chapter. (I do think Mary is wrong about some of the lit, but this is to be expected of a fifteen-year-old; a person can't really be expected to appreciate Moby Dick until they are older. Also this is vastly hypocritical of me to say given that I still haven't actually read Moby Dick myself.)
...it is me, I am that person, I think I got about 90% of them. (Somehow I've managed to completely escape Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)
The premise: naive, overeducated Mary has just transferred from her tiny inderdisciplinary program for professor's kids to a more traditional high school. After a rocky start when her best-friend-of-convenience from her old school decides to ditch her, she is absorbed into a clique of new friends ...
... who are, despite the skepticism of some of the more high-school-genre-savvy members of Mary's family, in fact genuinely nice and well-meant and interested in being her friends! The main conflict centers around the fact that Mary's adoption into the group comes via her habit of mapping bad high school boyfriends onto bad boyfriends of nineteenth-century literature, and as a result she struggles with feeling like she must remain a Font of Literary Wisdom, especially when the first boy she identified as Bad turns out of course to be both Pretty Cool Actually and Kind Of Into Her.
The boy in question is indeed perfectly sweet and I have no beef with him, but the real heart of the book is very much the story of Mary learning how to model genuine friendship and believe that her new friends group might like her for her own sake and not just because they've all really bought into bibliomancy via Austen.
I'm also very fond of Mary's large array of siblings, who are all involved in their own sub-conflicts. My favorites, of course, are the Cool College Twins who are having lesbian Shakespeare society drama, because I am always going to be here for lesbian Shakespeare society drama, but the sarcastic baby brother is also charming and Mary's changing relationships with all of them as she undergoes her coming-of-age are extremely sweet.
The book overall is really very warm-hearted about all its characters -- even the Mean Former Best Friend plotline is mostly an exploration of how people sometimes grow out of each other and it's really not anybody's fault -- which makes it a very soothing read, especially if you also happen to find it soothing to play the game of Name That Brit-Lit Plot Point every chapter. (I do think Mary is wrong about some of the lit, but this is to be expected of a fifteen-year-old; a person can't really be expected to appreciate Moby Dick until they are older. Also this is vastly hypocritical of me to say given that I still haven't actually read Moby Dick myself.)
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