REVIEW: Book

When I first dove into "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" by Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt, I expected something more … well … interesting. That's basically the only way to put it.

The book is about a group of girls in their sophomore year of high school who call themselves The Miracle Girls. This book is the follow-up to another Miracle Girls book, but it wasn't good enough to make me want to go back and read the first — or any of the other books that will follow this one.

"Breaking Up is Hard to Do" has a lot of promise but just falls flat in all the wrong places. The main character, Christine Lee, is the basic "rebel without a cause" teen. She's got a nose ring and hates her soon-to-be stepmom. Yawn. Like we don't have enough of those types floating around teenage fiction these days. Her mom died in a car crash, and she sees the school shrink once a week to talk about it.

Here's one of the parts where the book had promise but failed. Christine is supposed to talk to the therapist about her mom's death and how she's handling it, which actually would have been interesting, powerful and emotional and probably would have touched me as a reader. Instead, she spends most of these sessions talking about gym class and her new crush, until the very end, when she somewhat decides to open up. So despite her rebellious attitude and what seems at times to be strong independence, she ends up falling for a boy who just wants to be friends, and she can't get over it. Just like most other teen books, sadly.

To make matters worse, all The Miracle Girls get boyfriends in this book, and this causes their friendship to break up, because no one wants to hang out with "just the girls" anymore. As it turns out, Christine's dad is remarrying a woman named Candace, whom Christine calls "The Bimbo" (I swear … I could not make this stuff up). So as the wedding grows closer, Christine tries all she can to sabotage it and make her dad realize that Candace is actually an evil woman who wants to ruin their family. She's actually a nice woman who makes everyone happy, so trying to side with Christine is even harder, and you basically just want to tell her to shut up and stop complaining about everything for once.

I think some of the themes of the book are those that teens can relate to, like friends ditching you for boyfriends or a loved one dying, but I think the authors could have focused more on those things and less on trying to develop the whiny main character.

They also tried to get a religious message across, but I'm still not sure what they were trying to say. For half the book, Christine doesn't believe in God (at least not anymore, since her mom died), then at the end she maybe kind of believes again. It wasn't very clear, and the ending left me wanting more. Or maybe less.

"Breaking Up is Hard To Do" is a book that's too long, has an unclear plot and an annoying main character. So I recommend you leave this book off your summer reading list.

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