REVIEW for Getting the Girl

TITLE: Getting the Girl

AUTHOR: Susan Juby

DATE: September 30, 2008

GENRE: YA

RATING: 4 stars

I received this book through the kindness of the author, Susan Juby. Thank you Susan!!!

I discovered Susan Juby a few years ago through her series of Alice books. I am an adult who has read and re-read the Alice books more times than I care to admit.

I was extremely happy to learn that Susan had written a new book. In Getting the Girl, she introduces us to a new hero (or maybe he is the anti-hero?) his name is Sherman and yes, he is just as geeky as his name implies (sorry to all you Shermans out there).

Althrough I tried not to compare Alice with Sherman, I could not stop myself. Actually, Sherman is both similar and extremely different from Alice. Sherman is a bit off the wall in a nerdy, cute way. He has absolutely no self-awareness of the fact that he is kind of weird and that makes him absolutely adorable (but no less geeky).

In Getting the Girl, Sherman sets out on a mission to discover who, among the school bullies, could possibly be targeting girls for the D-list, once you are on the D-list -you are all but dead to the rest of the school population. When I first read this, I thought it was nothing more than some high school prank - until we get further into the book to find out that the girls who have been D-listed have done everything from quit school to try suicide. This is, of course, a very timely parallel to the school bullying that we are hearing so much about these days. It must be very difficult to be a teenager or even a pre-teen in this day and age.

Sherman finds himself in one weird situation after the other as he tries to PI his way into figuring out who could be doing all this D-listing. Juby describes some very funny incidents in which Sherman usually ends up being the joke. There is also a very cute sidestory which shows us just how out of tune Sherman really is - at one point, he is trying his best to impress a girl by the name of Dini and gets expert advice from his long time friend Vanessa on how best to do this - except that Sherman keeps getting sidetrack by Vanessa's body - but still remains clueless to the fact that he may actually be interested in her.

You will root for Sherman to figure all of this out, you will root for him to throw the best dinner party the school has ever eaten and as for the D-filer.......you will not guess who it is until the end.

I loved this book, it is witty and charming and delivers an important message. A great read for all ages.