Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Fancy White Trash ~ Marjetta Geerling review

Fancy White Trash
Viking Juvenile
240 Pages
May 15, 2008
Hardcover

Amazon description:

Finding love is simple with the One True Love Plan.

“If only life were as easy as your sisters.” Abby’s heard that one before. And it’s true —Shelby and Kait aren’t exactly prim and proper. Abby is determined not to follow in their footsteps, so she has created the One True Love Plan. The most important part of the plan is Rule #1: Find Someone New. This means finding a guy who hasn’t already dated Shelby or Kait. But when Abby starts falling for the possible father of Kait’s baby, she has to figure out if some rules are meant to be broken.

This debut novel, a modern comedy of errors, is as lighthearted and irreverant as its title.

Fancy White Trash is amazing in beacoup ways--it's quite possibly my favorite book of 2008 It's a book that could have just been absurd in Jerry Springer way but instead it was amazingly absurd in a jerry Spring if it were taken over by..well, Marjetta Geerling and you found out that the two sisters with the same boyfriend also had this other sister who was trying to just be normal and had n awesome best friend and was trying to find herself a best friend and get on with her life while the whole town expected her to turn out like her mother and sisters.

Basically, it's a book that could have gone off the deep end and been too crazy to even be enjoyable, but what saved it (and I hate to even use that phrase) was also what made me love it so darn much: Ms Geerling loves her characters and knows them inside and out.

I'm nto sure I've read any other book lately (maybe ever) where it was so obvious and apparent that the author wrote the story absolutely knowing her characters and liking them, too. (And with at least 7 or eight characters prominent in the book, that's sayign something.) Sometimes it's obvious a book is driven by the storyline and the characters are made to work within that story, sometimes the plot and the characters both make the story work, sometimes the characters drive the story.

I'm not sure that this book was solely driven by the characters (because the events really did make the book humorous and enjoyable and touching and amazing)... But, I'm going to sound like a broken record here and tell you that you just need to read this book because of how perfect the characters are. I adore them all.

I don't own this book (I got it from the library) but once I give up my plan of finding a way to get a signed copy (I have some books with my name all pretty in the front and my adoration of this book makes me want the same for it), I'll buy one.

I wanted to get this posted though, so that you could all know how amazing and fantastic and wonderful and lovely and lovely and awesome the book was (I made my mom read it and she agreed--possibly to a lesser extent because, well, I'm in love with it) and use holiday money to buy it!!

So: Fancy White Trash? 11/10

Marjetta Geerling please write some more books! Everyone else please buy her book! You'll love Abby and Kait and Cody and everyone!! really, just buy it, please?

6 comments:

  1. Now I'm conflicted because I've also heard bad things about this book!

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  2. Thanks for stopping by Literary Menagerie and entering the giveaway!

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  3. You have been tagged:

    http://literarymenagerie.blogspot.com/2009/01/bookshelf-meme.html

    Hope you like memes!

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  4. Good News! You're the winner of Carpe Diem from my Start the New Year with Books contest! E-mail me at greenbeanteenqueen at gmail dot com and I'll get the book off your way!
    Congrats!
    -Sarah

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