S.A.S.S. 6

Mixed feelings on this one. The sightseeing was enjoyable and the program work itself, spending the summer building a school for local orphans, was new and good, but the characters and their drama fell flat. A shame considering this is the same author I just praised for the previous German book.

So Cat is off to Mexico. Most of the book is focused on her poor reaction to her parents' divorce and her mother's remarriage. Her father is some sort of international businessman, so he was an absentee dad, and then when her parents got divorced, her mother remarried and she was forced to relocate, Cat decided to basically hate everything and sabotage her own life. She tried to fail her classes, but being a good student, the best she could manage to fail was by getting Cs. She gave up her passion: diving. She didn't try to make friends or get to know her new stepfather. She was basically a spoiled brat and this behavior I've read in other books but from far younger characters. She's too old to be pulling this bullshit.

So off she goes to Mexico, planning on spending the summer girl-bonding with her best friend from her former home in Arizona. Only said best friend turns up with a boyfriend she never told Cat about. I would have confronted her with this immediately, but Cat's kind of a pussyCat. And the reasoning behind it is sheer petty bullshit. Sabrina, the Arizona friend, got mad at Cat for being all into her own problems and not asking about Sabrina's life, so she hid a giant part of her life from Cat. Fucking petty bitch. Sabrina is the worst friend character I've read so far. Eco-obsessed girl who becomes a total pushover around the new boyfriend. Fucking weak bitch.

Cat has about two chapters of bumping heads with her host family's revolutionary daughter, but she turns out to be cool, because we can't have problems with both her AND Sabrina, now can we?

The other side characters are a pair of twins with almost no personality. Pete, the male twin, is a scrawny nerd who hits on anything with boobs, and Rachel, the girl twin...is the girl twin. Seriously, she has no character.

Aidan, the romantic interest, is the best character in the whole thing, because he points out all the shit Cat is doing wrong in her life and she finally stops being afraid of dating, afraid of romance, and gets the fuck over her living situation because she realizes she has it pretty good compared to the orphans she's building a school for.

So Cat's working out her own issues and then she sees Brian, Sabrina's boyfriend, being a cheating asshat, but of course, Sabrina doesn't believe her and drama drama boring drama until she seems him in action herself. At least at the end, Cat realizes she's got to move on with her own life and her friendship with Sabrina is never going to be the same. I see her sticking with Aidan, who's not that far away from her new Boston home in his home of NYC. Stick with him, girl, he's not stupid.

In summary, lackluster or just plain annoying characters drag down a decent Mexico S.A.S.S. set up.

Next stop: Japan with the idiot Japanese-American who thinks she can impress the German guy by pretending to be from Japan when she actually knows as little as he does. This one is already painful.