My Big Fat Teen Crisis by Jenny Smith

My Big Fat Teen Crisis by Jenny Smith
Buy My Big Fat Teen Crisis by Jenny Smith at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: Robert James
Summary: Jenny Smith's excellent narrator and breezy writing style make this one well worth checking out for younger teens and older tweens.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 208	Date: March 2012
Publisher: Scholastic
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781407115955
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Sam’s left alone when her best friend moves to the Outer Hebrides. Can she take this opportunity to reinvent herself as a cooler, more sophisticated person? And will she manage to win the heart of the new boy at school, David? Aided by her childhood friend Cat, who’s just returned to the area, she’ll do her best – as long as the nasty Tania doesn’t get in the way.

This is a really modern book – with a fair amount taking place via Facebook status updates, and through internet chats between Sam in Greenfields and Gemma in the Outer Hebrides. However, it deals with the same topics of friendship, bullying, and first love that crop up so often in books for this age group because of their importance. With an engaging central character and a breezy writing style, it’s an appealing story which is well worth checking out. Sam is very sweet – slightly immature at the start of the book but still likeable enough, she does a fair amount of growing up during the course of the story but develops in a very realistic way. She has a really strong narrative voice and Jenny Smith has done a great job of capturing the language that teens use today.

The book also has some excellent minor characters, most notably Lucy, a 17-year-old friend of Sam’s with cerebral palsy – an absolutely lovely portrayal of someone with a condition not often dealt with in children’s or teen fiction. That said, I found the bully in the book, Tania, to be a little bit too one-dimensional. I also thought there were a couple of things which were rather predictable. (But having said that, I’m between two and three times as old as most of the target audience for this one so most readers will probably have read significantly fewer similar stories than I have!)

Overall, though, this is recommended as a pleasant read which older tweens and younger teens will be sure to enjoy.

One of my favourites of the last few years for this age range is the fabulous Life, Death and Gold Leather Trousers by Fiona Foden, which deals with similar themes of first love and rivalry between girls.

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You can read more book reviews or buy My Big Fat Teen Crisis by Jenny Smith at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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