Girl v. Boy by Yvonne Collins & Sandy Rideout

Genre: YA Fiction

Publication Date: July 2008

Author Website: www.collinsrideout.com

One Word Review: Enjoyable

First Line: “I glance around the auditorium, trying to take everything in without looking like I’m remotely interested.”

Synopsis: “When offered a chance to write an anonymous column for the school paper chronicling Dunfield High's efforts in Chicago's citywide literacy challenge, 16-year-old Luisa Perez jumps at the chance. She hopes to distance herself from her family's legacy of academic underachievement as well as to differentiate herself from the ten other Luisa Perezes in the school. The competition between the girls and boys heats up, as each group tries to outdo the other in fundraising. Luisa offers the girls' perspective for the paper, while another writer provides the male point of view. As if juggling her writing, a part-time job, school and a sudden rush of possible F.B.s (future boyfriends) were not hard enough, Luisa has to contend with her sister, Grace, who moves back home with her young daughter.” -GoodReads

Kathy’s Review: This turned out to be a very enjoyable story. I got a kick out of our main character Luisa. She’s had a somewhat hard life and has set a goal to graduate high school, something no one in her family has accomplished. Her English teacher see’s potential in her and asks her to write an anonymous column on a contest the school is having. She rotates each week with another anonymous male author. When she isn’t writing she is trying to figure out who the other author is. There are a few different possibilities and it was fun trying to figure out who the competition was. I figured it out early on and it was fun to see these two together, knowing something that they don’t know. I thought Luisa and “this guy” had good chemistry together. Luisa dates quite a bit in this book, so it was fun to see the different kinds of guys and was happy with who she finally ended up with. Overall, it was a fun read and would recommend it to anyone who likes cute high school stories.

It was pretty clean (I don’t remember any swearing?), a little talk of sex. Luisa’s older sister got pregnant pretty young and it shows the trials she’s had to go through by keeping the baby (instead of going the adoption route). I liked that Luisa had her head on straight and didn’t want to make the same mistakes that her sister or her mother made. One other note, the articles they write do have a lot of innuendo’s that I really don’t think a high school would allow, but it was still pretty clean.