Fangirl

September 10, 2012
Baker, a correspondent for E! Enter-tainment Television, makes his YA debut with a fun, pop culture–saturated romance filled with song lyrics, IM chats, text messages, and hashtags. Fourteen-year-old Josie Brant’s loner life is turned upside-down when her BFF Ashley wins a contest using a song Josie wrote. The prize is meeting 16-year-old singing sensation Peter Maxx, and when Josie does, sparks fly. Peter and Josie begin to communicate via Twitter and, despite their disparate lives, connect over their shared passion for songwriting and help each other deal with parental difficulties (including divorce, arrest, and death) and the pressures of fame. When Josie and Peter reconnect in Las Vegas, their worlds collide disastrously. As Baker
alternately focuses on Josie and Peter’s points of view, it can sometimes feel as though he’s #tryingtoohard to construct believable, of-the-moment teenage characters (“ wished she could Tweet her fifty-nine followers the news. #Winning!”), but readers should still enjoy this heart-racing, behind-the-music story of love and being true to oneself. Ages 12–up. Agent: Michael Bourret, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.

September 15, 2012
In what could have been an escapist fantasy romp, E! Entertainment Television chief news correspondent Baker delivers a tepid Hollywood romance. The protagonists are Josie, a 14-year-old California tomboy, and Peter Maxx, a 16-year-old Justin Bieber-like teen idol. Josie and Peter overcome the odds, their frenemies and their own anxieties to find chaste true love and a reliably tidy ending. Whole paragraphs of journalistic exposition befit Baker's reportorial background but translate awkwardly to narrative fiction; the stiff third-person narration is too distant to make Josie and Peter's alternating perspectives feel authentic. A relentless stream of pop-culture references (Coldplay, TOMS shoes, Formspring) feel less like real teen dialogue and more like an adult straining for relevance, anchoring the story to a very specific period in time that might render it already passe among trend-spotting teens. Baker's access to entertainment titans has given him much to draw upon in his descriptions of the lonely life of a teenage star, but the story's stale arc might be insufficiently compelling to hook readers not suffering from Bieber fever. Intriguing premise, flawed execution. (Fiction. 12-16)

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 1, 2012

Gr 8-10-This lackluster novel has a promising premise but reads like a script from a made-for-TV movie. Josie Brant, a high school loner, has a secret infatuation with the famous pop star Peter Maxx. When her best friend, Ashley, submits a song Josie wrote to the "Sing it to the Maxx" contest, Josie suddenly finds herself meeting and impressing her crush. As the novel progresses, Peter, who is struggling between wanting to be a normal teenager and all of the responsibilities that come with being a pop star, reaches out to her and eventually asks her to come to his show in Las Vegas. Between having her father put in jail for growing marijuana and having the few friends she did have disown her, Josie decides that sneaking out to Las Vegas is the grown-up thing to do. She gets a ride from her punk-rock, Harry-Potter-loving, old-beyond-her-years neighbor. The language throughout the novel seems to be trying so hard to sound like teen speak that it goes into the realm of grating and unrealistic. Add to that the drive to Las Vegas when Josie's friend starts talking about the dangers of having sex too early, and readers are beat over the head with the awkward language and moral messages. The story wraps up with a too-good-to-be-true ending. Pass on this one and recommend Gordon Korman's Born to Rock (Disney, 2006) to students who are looking for a novel about what it's like to be a pop-star groupie.-Tammy Turner, Centennial High School, Frisco, TX

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.