Straight Up Teen Fiction

Book Review:  Winger by Andrew Smith

4 stars

Like everyone else on the planet, I've been inhaling all the dystopian young adult fiction series featuring "strong female characters" lately (The Hunger Games, Divergent, Uglies) and the occasional one where the point-of-view character is a boy (The Maze Runner).  But I really don't read much (any?) straight up teen fiction.  I came across a recommendation for this book somewhere, and thought, What the hell, I'll try it.  At first, I disliked the main character -- not like the shithead doctor in Summer House With Swimming Pool hated, but did not find him very interesting or sympathetic.  OK, he's a fourteen year old boy who goes to boarding school and plays rugby; he is not the hero of a SF/fantasy novel who is too busy learning spells, defeating evil, etc., to be kind of obnoxious about girls.  And he's two years younger than his peers, so he's particularly immature.  But I kept reading, and the story grew on me.  This book is not very plot-driven, but after I had the opportunity to recalibrate my expectations about this smart yet dumb-ass kid, and I got interested in his relationships with the other students, I was into it.  Even his initially-annoying way of rating the hotness of all the girls he meets at school on various ludicrous hotness scales was kind of funny by the end -- especially once you realize that other than the woman (it is not possible for me to resist calling her matron) who supervises his Dorm For Fuckups, he thinks all teenage girls and women are hot.  There is one scene that is one of the funniest things I read last month.  I almost cried, I laughed so much.  The ending was kind of...meh.  But overall, I enjoyed it, and it was worth my time.

A Different Sort of Scarf -- Tuesday, 10/7/14

I read a different kind of book; now I'm wearing a different kind of scarf -- a square silk scarf that I bought at the Goodwill boutique.  It's from the Art Institute of Chicago, and it's way pretty.

At first I was going to wear the navy top and sweater with grey pants, but the scarf has brown in it, so I went with brown pants.  (Pro tip: If you don't know what color to wear something with, let the masters at the Art Institute of Chicago figure this out for you.)  I'm still partial to navy with grey, but I liked trying something different.

* Navy knit shirt (from my mom)
* Navy open weave cardigan/shrug (thrifted, 89th & Madison -- an unfamiliar brand)
Medium brown pants (Kohls)
Brown wedges (thrifted, American Eagle)
* Navy/white floral scarf (thrifted, Art Institute of Chicago)