According to the book jacket:
“Jen and Wes do not ‘meet cute’. They do not fall in love at first sight. They do not swoon with scorching desire. They do not believe that they are instant soul mates destined to be together forever. This is not that kind of love story.”
Except that it pretty much is.
So Wes doesn’t start off considering Jen to be double-t-hott and Jen dates Wes’s dorky friend before she and Wes start going out–but those are mere footnotes to what this story really is–a sappy love story between high-schoolers.
Now here’s the thing. I love chick-flicks, I enjoy romances, I like love stories (especially sappy ones.)
What I do not like is sappy high school love stories.
Why? Because I think high school is the wrong time to be “falling in love”. And I especially think high school is the wrong time to be having sex.
Which is why when Wes and Jen started having sex (or seemed to me to be getting close to it), I shut this book for good.
I don’t need to be filling my mind with that sort of trash–and there was nothing redeeming in the plot to make me skip over the raunchy bits and keep going.
This may have been a Cybils nominee, but it’s certainly not a winner in my book.
**Side Note: The title “The Big Crunch” comes from a scientific theory Jen’s science teacher teaches as fact–that the universe expanded in the “Big Bang” and will someday contract in a “Big Crunch” in preparation for another Big Bang. While I wouldn’t be surprised at this being taught in a high school (since high school science is generally around 15 years behind true science), it still managed to tick me off that it was presented as truth in this book. You see, that theory, known as the oscillating universe theory, was devised in an attempt to avoid the most obvious implications of the Big Bang–the necessity of an infinitely powerful uncreated Creator who is outside our space-time continuum. Problem is, there’s absolutely no evidence for an oscillating universe–which is why today’s astronomers and cosmologists have, by and large, abandoned this theory (the honest folk for what one astronomer called “the first church of the God of the Big Bang”-generally Christianity; the naturalist ideologues for unfalsifiable theories such as multiverse theory.**
Rating:0 Stars
Category:YA Fiction
Synopsis:Wes and Jen meet, are attracted to one another, begin sleeping together. Imagine that.
Recommendation: Don’t read it. It’s trash with nothing whatsoever with which to redeem itself.
Sounds like a loser on all counts. Thanks for the heads up.
This is one reason I have a hard time picking out YA fiction. Thanks for doing the dirty work for me! ;-)