The Basic Eight (edition 2000)

It started out great, but then about halfway through I began to hate it. I never did finish it, so maybe it got great again. I doubt it. ( )

This book was good--a fairly quick, engrossing read. I'm hesitant to say too much about the plot, as it was very reminiscent of another book--but to mention the title will totally ruin The Basic Eight, so you're best off just reading it for itself, and waiting until you're finished to put it down and rant, "That was just like ______________!"

In fact, the ending is why I only gave it 4 stars, instead of the 5 I was thinking it deserved until that point. ( )

I don't know that there are words. Just know that you need to read this book. ( )

It took me a while to slog through this. It was well written and somewhat interesting but for some reason just didn't grab me. I loved the reminder about being pretentious in high school though; I think this is the only time in one's life when being pretentious is charming. ( )

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/515121.html

"I was amused by the characters at first; [my friend] used the phrase "petit bourgeois teenagers," which is pretty accurate. The pretentiousness struck me as funny instead of grating (at first), and that's part of why I recommended the book to her.

[...]

The other thing I liked was just that the novel actually felt like high school to me, which many novels about teenagers fail to do. The problem tends to be that many authors view the school part of high school as nonessential to the plot, and as such, gloss over it. [...] But anyone who's actually in high school knows that classes and such aren't incidental, they a huge part of the teenage experience, dominating your consciousness and defining your life for that period of time. So many of the journal entries in this novel reflect that - Flannery might mention something that happened in class and not say anything about her friends at all and that's an entire day. [...]

Because the book is a teenage journal, it is hard to read at times. I don't remember what my journal entries looked like as a teenager, but I would hope I believed in paragraph breaks. [...] Flannery evens acknowledges she's changing things around to make them flow better but part of the novel's conceit is that she's really not that good at it, and sometimes things don't work properly and she knows it, too. So I was never really sure if I missed something earlier in the novel, or she did. Maybe it sounded like a good idea in Handler's head, but on paper it doesn't work as well and it certainly doesn't work well in my head." ( )