Ah, I've finally caught up and gotten all the GotY books read!
Joss is this year's and her books are in yet another new format. Illustrations are back HOORAY. And the art in her book is cute.
Erin Falligant has done a lot of lesser writing for AG, but Joss is her first big character work and I kinda hope that's all she gets. The books are not especially well-written. Joss is partially deaf, so there's a lot with her different methods of communication that I thought was interesting and handled nicely, but there are other bits I had issues with.
As you can tell from the cover, Joss is a surfer. The first book has her wanting to enter a contest to meet her surfing hero. She and her best friend are teaming up to make a video and one of their competitors is Joss's kinda jerky older brother. She's also got an even older brother who's super awesome.
To win a bet and gain her jerky-yet-video-skilled brother Dylan's help, Joss has to audition for the cheer team and make it. She doesn't have to join the squad, just get in. So she accepts and does indeed make it. Then she starts to realize she likes it, which causes a lot of tension between her and her artistic surfing BFF who feels left out. My only issue with this is that it's honestly not that well explained WHY Joss is suddenly into cheer. She sticks with it because her eldest brother's girlfriend is on the senior team and she (Reina) says that the skills Joss works on in cheer can make her a better surfer. As the book goes on, we see more why Joss is interested, but that initial decision to accept her place on the squad comes kinda out of nowhere.
Cheer, by the way, isn't like stereotypical high school cheerleading, rahrahing the boys' team on. It's a more organized, athletic sport. Although wearing giant bows on their heads still seems stupid to me.
So the book has Joss and her BFF getting into the inevitable fight. Her BFF gets really mean about things. The fighting part of this book is pretty serious and the making up doesn't seem to equal the badness of the fighting.
Naturally, the girls make up, Joss and Dylan make up, they all work together and win the video contest and Joss stays in cheer.
The second book finds Joss preparing for a cheer competition and the school talent show. She gets roped into having her bulldog do skateboard stunts for the talent show (the dog does enjoy skateboarding already so it's not out of nowhere) and that ends badly, leading to a rift between Joss and her cheer teammate Brooklyn.
Then after a bad run at a more dangerous surf spot, Joss's confidence is shattered and she's afraid to do her trick as her cheer team's newest flyer. I had issues with this part of the book because I felt the other characters all forced her to finally agree to try the harder trick, but when you're doing dangerous stuff, it's important to take your time and build your confidence back up naturally. Not because your teammates are giving you shit because you're letting them down by not trying for the stunt that gets them the most points in competition. I didn't like the other characters' motivations or the way they handled this situation. It really was not a good message for the readers. There's this whole bit about how we're a team so one person doesn't get to decide what we do. Well, if that one person is the one being held above all the others doing the most dangerous stuff and she doesn't feel safe, she's got a fucking right to say so.
So yeah, I wasn't impressed with Joss. The best characters were Liam, Joss's eldest brother, and his girlfriend Reina, who's pretty awesome. And Murph the dog.
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