In the first and what looks like shortest book in the series, Abby is off to London from her home city of New York.
Abby, however, is no Stacey McGill. She's 16, but her parents are so overprotective that I bet she barely enjoys the fact that she lives in my favorite city in the world. Wanting to broaden her horizons because she considers herself too "vanilla," she lets her friend talk her into attending a college party, where she meets her first ever boyfriend. He's a freshman, but the almost-40 part of me says "What does a freshman want with a high school girl? Ew." Abby's parents have the same thoughts and force her to apply for the S.A.S.S. program. She gets in and she's off to London.
Abby's determined to add a little chocolate sauce or sprinkles to her vanilla self and she ends up befriending a punky Philly native with green-striped hair. I liked Zoe's character and wished she'd appeared more. She also meets Ian, a freshman at City College, where the S.A.S.S. program is taking place and summer term is on for the other students.
Unlike with Cece's book, Abby's classes are ones she randomly chose and we never get to meet a single professor. It's barely like she's taking classes at all, even though the point of the series is STUDY abroad.
The sightseeing aspect is also much less, which disappointed me a lot. I loved Cece's book because it blended the romance bits with Cece's personal drama, her schooling and her travelling. This book focuses 99% on the personal drama and it's a disappointment that way.
There is drama indeed, because Abby's got boy trouble. You see, when her parents learned about James and forced her to apply for S.A.S.S. and she got in, she bought him a plane ticket to visit her. Then learned he'd been in a relationship with another girl at the same time. So she's getting over him in London, when she meets Ian, and falls into whirlwind, moving way too fast for 16 (minus the physical part) love with him...until James shows up, having used his ticket. James is there to win Abby back and instead of telling him to fuck off, she decides to run off to Dublin with him for a few days and see if there's anything there worth saving. I felt really bad for Ian, because even though their relationship is doomed by distance, that was still a dick move. While Abby has a good time with James, she sends him flying home without promise of them getting back together. And then avoids Ian for awhile after he blows off her call. They eventually talk, but Abby's decided she wants to be by herself, which is all well and good, but then she shouldn't have led him on in the first place. "*Sebastian voice* Teenagers."
The book is decently-written for what it is and I enjoyed it a lot, even laughed aloud a few times, but I wasn't thrilled that the study and sightseeing aspects were tossed aside so easily. I'm hoping the other authors in this series don't do that. It might explain things a bit that the most recent thing by this author is the novelization of Mean Girls. She's good at drama, but maybe was too lazy to research London to write about it properly.
Next stop: Rome. But the girl's a fashionista, so my Classicist side is likely going to be disappointed in her lack of appreciation of the ancient world.
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