Series: All-American Girl

Review: Ready or Not by Meg Cabot

Posted October 9, 2007 by Rowena in Reviews | 4 Comments

Review: Ready or Not by Meg CabotReviewer: Rowena
Ready or Not (All-American Girl #2) by Meg Cabot
Series: All-American Girl #1
Also in this series: All-American Girl (All-American Girl #1)
Publisher: Harper Collins, Harper Teen
Publication Date: August 1st 2005
Genres: Young Adult
Pages: 238
Add It: Goodreads
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Ripped Bodice | Google Play Books
three-stars
Series Rating: four-stars

Top ten things Samantha Madison isn't ready for:

10. Spending Thanksgiving at Camp David
9. With her boyfriend, the president's son
8. Who appears to want to take their relationship to the Next Level
7. Which Sam inadvertently and shockingly announces live on MTV
6. While appearing to support the president's dubious policies on families, morals, and yes, sex
5. Juggling her new after-school job at Potomac Video
4. Even though she already has a job as teen ambassador to the UN (that she doesn't get paid for)
3. Riding the Metro and getting accosted because she's "the redheaded girl who saved the president's life," in spite of her new, semipermanent Midnight Ebony tresses
2. Experiencing total role reversal with her popular sister Lucy, who for once can't get the guy she wants
And the number-one thing Sam isn't ready for?
1. Finding out the hard way that in art class, "life drawing" means "naked people."

I guess it had to happen sooner or later, I mean, it happens with all kinds of favorite authors and Meg Cabot has finally written a book that I wasn’t too wild about, but I still hecka love her.

In the sequel to All American Girl, it’s a year later and Samantha Madison is a 15 year old American Teen Ambassador for the UN and we follow her life after having saved the President of the United States. She’s still taking art lessons from Susan Boone and she’s still dating the First Son, David and she’s still out of her frickin’ mind.

She’s one of those emo kids that drive me absolutely bonkers! She’s got great red hair, she dyes it midnight black and now she looks like a bootleg Ashlee Simpson. Her boyfriend tells her to come away for the Thanksgiving Weekend with him and his parents to hang out and play some parcheesy and she goes completely nuts because she thinks that David wants to have sex with her.

Now, it wasn’t so long ago that I was 15 and I can remember being completely boy crazy but I do not ever remember agonizing over having sex when I was 15 because I knew I wasn’t ready for it and though I know that teenagers are a lot more passionate about everything, Sam just drove me nuckin’ futs with all of her assumptions.

She gets invited to Thanksgiving with her boyfriend and his parents and she totally assumes that David wants to jump her bones. So like Sam does with everything, she agonizes over it until I want to choke her out for being so retarded about everything. The way she blabs on national TV that she said YES TO SEX made me roll my eyes and then the whole cafeteria scene where everyone is standing up and saying, “I’m a slut too” made my eyes roll down the street because that just doesn’t happen in real life and even though I really didn’t buy the whole thing, I can’t say that I hated the book, just that Sam drove me crazy.

I guess, I was disappointed in the direction that Meg Cabot took this book because I didn’t think that this book was appropriate for 15 year old girls because well, I certainly wouldn’t want my nieces to read this book and get any ideas because I have a niece that’s Sam’s age and sex better be the last thing on her mind, I also have a niece that’s 16 almost 17 and again, sex better be the last thing on her mind..I don’t mind them being curious but to actually be doing it, well I just hope that they’re not following the things that they see on TV and reading in books.

I wouldn’t want to shield my nieces from reading this book but I just, I don’t want them getting those ideas in their heads that since Sam is having sex, protected sex and whatever, that as long as they’re safe then it’s okay because I don’t think they should be having sex right now and this is me speaking from experience and well, I just don’t want them getting influenced from this book.

I would have liked the book more if Sam didn’t disappoint me by changing her mind at the end about being ready and I could have totally done without that scene where Lucy tells her how Sam can find out if she’s ready to have sex or not, the whole bath tub thing? GROSS! Who talks about crap like that? Nobody I know…

…so yeah, I didn’t hate this book but I didn’t really like it either, Sam drove me crazy and I wanted to bop her upside her head a number of times but I wouldn’t say that this is the worst book I’ve ever read…ehh, I guess where this book is concerned I’m just confused. It was just, okay.

Ugh. Take this review how you want to, I just don’t know. LOL.

Grade: 3 out of 5

three-stars

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Review: All American Girl by Meg Cabot

Posted September 13, 2007 by Rowena in Reviews | 3 Comments

Review: All American Girl by Meg CabotReviewer: Rowena
All-American Girl (All-American Girl #1) by Meg Cabot
Series: All-American Girl #1
Also in this series: Ready or Not (All-American Girl #2)
Publisher: Harper Collins, Harper Teen
Publication Date: July 22nd 2003
Genres: Young Adult
Pages: 398
Add It: Goodreads
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Ripped Bodice | Google Play Books
four-half-stars
Series Rating: four-stars

Samantha Madison is an average, cool Washington, D.C., teen: She loves Gwen Stefani (who doesn't?), can draw like nobody's business, and enjoys being opposite to her sister's annoying ultra-social personality. But when she ditches art class one day, she doesn't expect to be jumping on the back of a wannabe presidential assassin.

Soon the young hero is receiving worldwide acclaim for her bravery, having dinner with her family at the White House, and is even being named teen ambassador to the UN. As if this weren't enough, she and David, the president's son, strike up a friendship that everyone wants the dirt on, which starts to give her romantic "frisson" feelings.

Unfortunately, Sam thinks her sister's boyfriend, Jack, is the true love of her life, and she makes a few wrong turns that could screw up what she's developing with David. Will she ever stop following what she knows and start following what she sees?

Have I told you guys how much I heart Meg Cabot? Because I totally do. She never fails to amuse me and wrap me up in the little worlds she creates for each of her stories. I was just as absorbed in Sam’s world of black clothes and nerdy geeky art boys who are so cute as I was when I was reading about Jen Greenley and hottie newspaper editor Scott from Teen Idol and Mel and John from The Boy Next Door. Meg Cabot has this amazing ability to write stories that sucks me right in and leaves me wanting, MORE AND MORE AND MORE!

I’m a total Meg Cabot fan girl.

Seriously.

I kid you not.

Okay, I’ll quit it with the creepy Dylan and Skeeter 2-4 word sentences that drives everyone batty…and if you’ve read the Crazy series by Tara Janzen then you totally know what I’m talking about with that Dylan/Skeeter bit. =)

Anyhoo, so this book is about Samantha Madison who is living in D.C. and basically just hating her life. She hates that she’s the middle child and she the “forgotten” one next to her older and more pretty sister, Lucy and then her younger and brainier sister, Rebecca. Sam’s a social outcast because she gets tortured at school by her ex best friend, Kris Parks who is the bane of her high school years. And to make matters worst, she’s in love with her sister’s artsy “radical” rebel boyfriend. Jack doesn’t seem to love her or even see her the same way she does him and she’s waiting for that perfect moment, when he will realize it’s her that he’s in love with and has all the same things in common with her and not her sister, Lucy.

Lucy let’s it slip that Jen does these fantastic celebrity drawings for the kids at school, you know, she draws pictures of celebrities with whatever student at school and totally charges the kids at school that she doesn’t particularly care for, you know, like Kris Parks, to their parents and Sam’s parents then catch on to why Sam is getting a C- in German, because that’s where she draws all of her pictures for the students.

Sam is just trying to get her little hussle on, come on now… =)

Well, her punishment for drawing during class and getting such a low grade in the class is to channel all of that artistic energy into an after school class that Sam is totally against, getting art lessons from Susan Boone.

Enter David, the cutie guy that likes to wear band shirts.

Cool band shirts.

One of the main things that Susan tries to get Sam to learn is to draw what she sees and not what she knows. And that’s basically what this book was about, getting Sam to see things, really see things.

It takes a few tries, but by the end of the book, she gets it.

Meg Cabot had a sister like me, trying to see things for my damn self. I kid you not, I was sitting there while I was reading this book, trying to really “see” things about me and Nathan’s relationship. I was up in my room, with All American Girl sitting on my chest, while I stared up at the ceiling and tried to “see” where I stood and how things were with me and Nathan. Meg Cabot did that to me and I swear, I felt like the biggest idiot in the world, but it didn’t stop me from loving the hell out of this book.

It was filled with lots of laugh out loud moments, lots of AWWWW how cute moments and a lot of high school jibberish that made me laugh, remembering the parties that I went to when I was in high school. I was cheering Sam and David on throughout the entire book and I was such a huge David fan that the more he came into the story, the more I loved him.

I lub him, a lot. He was a great hero, I’m so effing glad that I read this book because I can totally feel it, guys…my reading mojo is totally back because I have already started the second book to this series, Ready or Not and I have Meg frickin’ Cabot to thank for getting me out of my horrible reading slump that I’ve been in the entire summer.

Grade: 4.5 out of 5

four-half-stars

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