At first glance, Karla comes off as your quintessential vapid princess. She’s not quite a mean girl but, if she’s publicly ignoring a boy she kissed all summer and urging him to say nothing of their clandestine canoodling, she’s not a truly decent human being.
However, Karla proves to have hidden depths and problems. There’s a constant tension between her parents and she longs to escape the toxic atmosphere at home. Her initial presentation as a “queen bee” is revealed as a facade when Cameron realizes she has to kowtow to other people’s opinions to maintain her high status at school. She also has scifi interests that take Cameron by surprise and she has to explain that it’s possible to love something without letting it consume your life to the exclusion of other people.
Mackenzie more closely fits the mean girl stereotype but we’re assured that her sarcasm is just the way she shows friendship. I don’t accept that and most of her interactions with Cameron are rather jarring to read. Still, she shares Cameron’s interests and can bring herself to be civil towards him in brief spurts. However, while Cameron is comfortable around her and can be himself, I don’t see anything to their relationship beyond close friendship. Yet Cameron’s feelings towards her take a radical shift and we’re expected to believe there are passionate emotions involved.
Part of the problem this novel presents for me is that Cameron and his friends are devout lovers of anime, a subject that holds little to no interest for me, and they constantly characterize Karla’s group as being theater snobs. That is just baffling. In most YA books, the kids in theater are often characterized as awkward nerds who are more comfortable on a stage than with others; they rarely include the “cool” kids. Here, they’re somehow superior towards the anime club when anime is just another type of comic/action-adventure hero genre. Clearly, I’m missing something.
So I tried to ignore all the baffling paragraphs about “Dragon Ball Z”, “Ghost in the Shell”, et al. Instead I focused on Cameron’s convoluted emotions as he tries to entangle just what it is he has with Karla (adolescent gropings—an affair only not quite) and his burgeoning bewildering feelings during interactions with Mackenzie (video games, movie viewing and the aforementioned sarcastic interchanges).
There doesn’t seem to be much of anything solid to either relationship. But they do force Cameron to take a hard look at himself, what he wants from his life and how social hierarchies at his school can be as much a constraint on the people within the social circles as without them.
We can tell that Cameron’s attempts to juggle his seamy secret about Karla and his friendship with Mackenzie are going to explode in his face. So I felt no real tension waiting for the inevitable revelation of his rendezvouses with Karla. What was more important was Cameron’s inner growth on the way to learning who he is and what he truly wants.
He also becomes more understanding about other people’s passions and pursuits. A person can be a “nerd” about anything, it seems, and being consumed by a theatrical play is neither more nor less geeky than working for months on a Gundam battle suit. You can be friends with a girl without being in an affair de coeur with her. People can be snooty about any interests, especially if they shut out others. (This is particularly true of Cameron’s group of anime nerds since they number only four people when the book starts.)
In short, this novel turns out to have little to do with romance and a great deal to do with character growth. The characters (except for a fan pair who always bicker about the anime) become something greater than the sum of their parts. It’s not a Bildungsroman by any means (come on, who comes of age in HIGH SCHOOL?) but it has a bit more depth than you’d expect from the genre.
However, Karla proves to have hidden depths and problems. There’s a constant tension between her parents and she longs to escape the toxic atmosphere at home. Her initial presentation as a “queen bee” is revealed as a facade when Cameron realizes she has to kowtow to other people’s opinions to maintain her high status at school. She also has scifi interests that take Cameron by surprise and she has to explain that it’s possible to love something without letting it consume your life to the exclusion of other people.
Mackenzie more closely fits the mean girl stereotype but we’re assured that her sarcasm is just the way she shows friendship. I don’t accept that and most of her interactions with Cameron are rather jarring to read. Still, she shares Cameron’s interests and can bring herself to be civil towards him in brief spurts. However, while Cameron is comfortable around her and can be himself, I don’t see anything to their relationship beyond close friendship. Yet Cameron’s feelings towards her take a radical shift and we’re expected to believe there are passionate emotions involved.
Part of the problem this novel presents for me is that Cameron and his friends are devout lovers of anime, a subject that holds little to no interest for me, and they constantly characterize Karla’s group as being theater snobs. That is just baffling. In most YA books, the kids in theater are often characterized as awkward nerds who are more comfortable on a stage than with others; they rarely include the “cool” kids. Here, they’re somehow superior towards the anime club when anime is just another type of comic/action-adventure hero genre. Clearly, I’m missing something.
So I tried to ignore all the baffling paragraphs about “Dragon Ball Z”, “Ghost in the Shell”, et al. Instead I focused on Cameron’s convoluted emotions as he tries to entangle just what it is he has with Karla (adolescent gropings—an affair only not quite) and his burgeoning bewildering feelings during interactions with Mackenzie (video games, movie viewing and the aforementioned sarcastic interchanges).
There doesn’t seem to be much of anything solid to either relationship. But they do force Cameron to take a hard look at himself, what he wants from his life and how social hierarchies at his school can be as much a constraint on the people within the social circles as without them.
We can tell that Cameron’s attempts to juggle his seamy secret about Karla and his friendship with Mackenzie are going to explode in his face. So I felt no real tension waiting for the inevitable revelation of his rendezvouses with Karla. What was more important was Cameron’s inner growth on the way to learning who he is and what he truly wants.
He also becomes more understanding about other people’s passions and pursuits. A person can be a “nerd” about anything, it seems, and being consumed by a theatrical play is neither more nor less geeky than working for months on a Gundam battle suit. You can be friends with a girl without being in an affair de coeur with her. People can be snooty about any interests, especially if they shut out others. (This is particularly true of Cameron’s group of anime nerds since they number only four people when the book starts.)
In short, this novel turns out to have little to do with romance and a great deal to do with character growth. The characters (except for a fan pair who always bicker about the anime) become something greater than the sum of their parts. It’s not a Bildungsroman by any means (come on, who comes of age in HIGH SCHOOL?) but it has a bit more depth than you’d expect from the genre.