All American Girl Review

It's pretty late, but I HAVE to write reviews for books immediately after I finish them sooooo... here it is! (It probably doesn't help that I'm hyped up on coffee and coca cola, huh?)





Title: All American Girl
Author: Meg Cabot
Publisher: HarperCollins, first published 2002
MSRP (Paperback, USA): $7.99
Pages: 416 (sounds like lot but it's one of those tiny compact PB's)
Rating: * * */5

Description, courtesy of Amazon: While waiting for her ride home from an after-school art class, Samantha Madison, a sophomore at John Adams Preparatory School in Washington, DC, inadvertently saves the President's life by jumping on the back of a would-be assassin. Suddenly, she is a celebrity, invited to the White House for dinner, named the teen ambassador to the U.N., and revered by her fellow classmates. Yet, even her new star status doesn't allow her to get what she really wants-a date with her sister's boyfriend, Jack. Hoping to make him jealous, she asks out the President's son. The plan backfires, but Samantha discovers who she really is in the process. Cabot uses vision as a metaphor for how a budding artist grows to "see" herself and others more clearly.

Something about this book didn't really work for me. I really love Meg Cabot's writing, how ditzy and fun it is, but this was a little disappointing to me.

Samantha wasn't someone I liked much. She was kind of... depressing. She walks around acting like she is just SO much more intelligent, creative, and generally BETTER than the rest of the world- she "mourns for her generation, whose main concern is what will happen on 'Friends' this week," as she says in the book (first of all, what does the girl got against my fave TV show? :P). She dyed all her clothes black to show it, too (gah!). That REALLY bothered me- she just drove me absolutely crazy sometimes with her whining! But, thinking back, it was probably written that way purposefully so she realizes at the end how pompous she's being. (Still...)

Actually, my favorite character in the book was, for some reason, surprisingly her sister Lucy. I don't know why- probably for the same reason my favorite character in Peace, Love and Baby Ducks was Peyton, for how crazy they are :)

So let's do a checklist on this book:

Is the plot ridiculously far fetched? Definitely.
Is the main character pretty dang annoying? Yup.
Is it a well written read anyways? Yes to the well written. It DID have excellent subplots, and (advance warning: I'm about to sound like one of those annoying old people who look for "lessons" in the books their kids read- GAH) had meaningful lessons. I was also really glad that she finally realized- to a certain degree, at least- how ridiculous she was being.

So overall, not Meg Cabot's best work, and not something top-recommended by me, but still a funny, interesting-enough read.