Rowena’s review of Jersey Angel by Beth Ann Bauman.
Main Character: Angel
Love Interest: Too many to name
Series: None
Author: Facebook|Twitter|Goodreads
It’s the summer before senior year and the alluring Angel is ready to have fun. She’s not like her best friend, Inggy, who has a steady boyfriend, good grades, and college plans. Angel isn’t sure what she wants to do yet, but she has confidence and experience beyond her years. Still, her summer doesn’t start out as planned. Her good friend Joey doesn’t want to fool around anymore, he wants to be her boyfriend, while Angel doesn’t want to be tied down. As Joey pulls away, and Inggy tours colleges, Angel finds herself spending more time with Inggy’s boyfriend, Cork. With its cast of vivid and memorable characters, this tale from the Jersey shore is sure to make some waves.
I’ve been itching to read this book since I saw the cover. I love the cover. The colors, the feel, I loved it all. I was really looking forward to reading a book because I kept thinking Jersey Shore and I thought it’d be a fun book but for me, it was anything but. One of my biggest things when reading a book is the characters. If you can get me to like your characters, connect with them, I will almost always enjoy your book.
But I just couldn’t like Angel. I couldn’t connect with her on any level and she was the worst kind of friend.
She’s a senior in high school, she lives in Jersey and she just broke up with her boyfriend because he wants to be more than just someone she sleeps with. There’s nothing wrong with Joey (the boyfriend, or well, the ex-boyfriend), she just doesn’t like to be tied down. She dumps him and then she continues to stalk him outside his window at night, wanting to hook up with him and when he shuts her down (for good), she starts sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. She didn’t fall in love with him, he didn’t fall in love with her but they started sleeping together anyway.
It was a real douchey thing to do and the thing about it was she knew it was wrong and yet, she kept doing it over and over again. I wanted to thrash her for being such a horrible friend to Inggy. She never developed feelings for Cork, he never developed feelings for her but they kept sleeping together like it wasn’t a big deal and that was a huge part of the reason that I couldn’t like Angel. She was selfish, plain and simple. She did what she wanted to do and to hell with whoever got hurt.
Over the course of the book, you can see that Angel is starting to wise up. She knows that she has to stop sleeping with Cork but she slips each and every time he shows up at her door. She still has feelings for Joey and he’s in a new relationship with another girl but that doesn’t stop her from showing up at his house in the middle of the night to hang out with him. My main issue with Angel was in the end, she learned her lesson but she doesn’t really make up for anything. The end was much too abrupt for my tastes. I mean, nothing is dealt with. Angel sleeping with Cork, betraying her best friend. In her head, it’s resolved. She resolves to be better, to stop sleeping with Cork but she doesn’t resolve the problems outside of her head. She doesn’t come clean to Inggy, she doesn’t apologize to everyone that she used over the course of the book but in the end, she gets the guy anyway. Joey was too good for Angel. He deserved way better than the likes of her.
I was really bothered by all of the bed hopping going on in this book and how casual these kids were about sex. One of Angel’s friend is pregnant and everyone else is jumping from bed to bed like it’s the thing to do (and apparently it is) and how unconcerned the parents were about it in this book. Angel’s Mom lets a seventeen year old (Angel) have an entire house to herself (they have three houses on the same street and when she’s not renting them out for money, the Mom lets Angel live there by HERSELF) and she lets Angel do whatever it is she wants. Honey, that’s why Angel is only seventeen and is already on the patch because she was addicted to smoking. The whole absent parent thing in this book had me shaking my head left and right. I wasn’t a fan.
Overall, I kept reading this book because I kept waiting for Angel to get over herself and start making amends for her actions but when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to do any of that, I was good and pissed. I can’t say that I enjoyed this book even though I really wanted to. I went into this book thinking that I’d get something cute and fluffy but what I got was a whole lot of WTF? So yeah, this isn’t a book that I can say that I enjoyed.
..and that’s your scoop!
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Book cover and blurb credit: http://barnesandnoble.com
