Last week, I was thinking about what book I wanted to read
next, but everything on my list seemed so serious. I wasn't in the mood for
historical fiction or dystopian YA- too much thinking involved in both. I
wanted something completely, purely mindless. So I picked up one of my old
favorite series from my early teenage years- The It Girl.
A spinoff from the also classically mindless Gossip Girl series by Cecily von
Zigesar, The It Girl series follows
fifteen year old Jenny Humphrey as she makes the move from her Upper East Side
prep school to a posh boarding school called Waverly Academy. Of course, she
was really forced to leave after her school deemed her
"inappropriate" (she modeled in a sports bra and was rumored to be
sleeping with everyone in her brother's band including her brother- yes, a
fifteen year old!) but she manages to find another rich people school to take
her in. When Little J (as she's known in the GG books) gets to Waverly, she is immediately surrounded by alcohol
and drugs and hookups and people with ridiculous names like Easy or Lon and her
new super popular roommates, Brett Messerschmidt and Callie Vernon. By the end
of the first book, the mysteriously beautiful and popular Tinsley Carmichael is
back after being kicked out for doing ecstasy in a field and that's when the
real drama starts.
The one thing that does make me mad is how every guy in
Waverly is obsessed with little Jenny Humphrey. Sure, she's supposedly
"different" from the rest of the Waverly elite because her dad is a
hippie and she has to buy clothes from the (gasp!) clearance rack at Barney's,
but she's really nothing super special. In the Gossip Girl show she's played by Taylor Momsen and you can see a
blonde stick getting a ton of attention, but in the books, Jenny Humphrey is a
five foot tall girl with a little bit of extra weight (i.e. not a stick), dark
curly hair, and huge boobs. Odds are nobody would have noticed her, but somehow
every guy at the school wants to date her because she's just "so
special" and "so different from everyone else" but really I just
think it's because of her boobs. After book four, she has kissed four different
guys, all four of whom also have the attention of the beautiful, most popular
girl in school, Tinsley Carmichael.
So yeah, Jenny is a little ridiculous, but luckily, she's
not the only main character. The best part of the books, in my opinion, is the
omnipotent point of view. The POV switches practically every couple of pages,
so you get all the different views on every situation, which is great when the
story's main plotline is fully gossip based. The POV characters are guys and
girls, so you also get the gossipy side from the boys which is pretty
interesting. The gossipy theme also makes them super addicting- I've read them
before, but I wanted to stay in the loop so much that I accidentally read books
2-4 in one day. I don't think I've read past book five before, so I'm pretty
excited to read the full series. If you can look past the blatant brand-whoring
(seriously I don't need to know that Callie's skirt is from Diane von
Fustenberg, all that means to me is it was expensive) and the probably
unrealistic amount of partying (but what do I know, I was a nerd in high
school) these fifteen and sixteen year olds do, The It Girl books are fun summer reads.
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