DragoArt.com, How to Draw Gerard Way, My Chemical Romance
(November 24) I ended up liking this, but things did not start well. The close parallels to Spoiled were off-putting, (1) because it felt (retroactively) like the Fug Girls were maybe plagiarists as well as lazy and (2) because I had plot fatigue over stories of teen girls who react badly to tragedies, screw themselves up, then get redeemed (via twoo wuv).
But about five-eighths of the way through, Sloppy Firsts suddenly became quite captivating and compelling, mostly because of an interesting boy who sails in and steals our heroine’s heart out of the blue, and who is about as anti-hero as you can get. So that was original and compensatory.
But will I go on to read the rest of the (five-book) series? No, I will not. In the end, Jess, the heroine, the first-person narrator, is just not that compelling to me.
The main thing about this reading experience was that it confirmed an uneasy sense I had that I can't trust the taste of a certain someone who often recommends books. She raves about certain books, such as this series, and gets me all excited. Alas, I have tried four different recommendations from her without sharing any of her rhapsody over them. They were all “OK,” but not rave-worthy for me.
So this is good-bye, L.... on the book-recommendation front, anyway.
