JUNIOR HIGH 2

Oh, gods, it's a teacher crush novel. At least we get it out of the way early. 

The cover girls are Jen, who looks pretty good, Tracy and Nora. Nora looks better than she did on the first cover, but it's not her best. She'll get many tries though. Despite the large number of characters, the only ones ever on the cover are Jen, Nora, Tracy, Mia (who they never get quite right) and Jason Anthony. I think one of the other boys is on one cover, though I'm not sure which boy it is and won't have a guess until I reread.

So we open with the girls already crushing on Mr. Rochester, their new English teacher, who's filling in for the regular teacher on maternity leave. 

This whole book is the girls trying different schemes to make sure they're the one "Cliff" likes best. Nora makes him a healthy diet plan. Tracy plays dumb. Susan shows off her intellectual prowess. Jennifer tells him about her save the whales meetings and he actually comes. Mia gives him punk albums to listen to. Then they start going to poor Steve for advice, only he gives them all the same advice, so one day they all show up with food and one day they all come in dressed to look older. 

That's when Mr. Rochester goes to Jeff, the Manns' housekeeper and the family friend who actually got him the job. Nora and Jennifer overhear an embarrassing conversation where Cliff asks Jeff for advice. He's worried he could lose his job because the drama teacher saw the girls all dressed up and suggested he was encouraging them. Jeff says they have to just let the crush burn out and it does pretty quickly. 

During this whole mess, the boys have tried different plans to get the girls to pay attention to them and Steve's at the end finally works. Although it also just happened to coincide with the collective losing interest so maybe it wasn't the plan after all. 

This was just painful. I like all the characters and a lot of the scenes were funny, but I've never gotten the whole crush on an older authority figure of some kind thing. This guy is TEN years older. That's a lot. The girls finally admit at the end that it would have been creepy if he did like one of them. 

My favorite thing was Mia and Andy. I'm a sucker for the punk couple. He's so devoted to her that he actually buys her an album she wants even though he's a) not speaking to her (Plan #1 to get the girls' attention back) and b) knows she's probably just going to let Mr. Rochester borrow it. I think Mia did get the best attention from Rochester. He gave her a compliment he had to know she'd love and he actually listened to her albums. Susan, Nora and Tracy got far less attention, though Jennifer did have a moment where he disturbed a bunch of people to sit by her at the whales meeting. As innocent as it was, it was nice to see the punk girl actually be the one to be liked the most. I think Mia treated Andy pretty horribly but she's 13, so it's to be expected. Andy is obviously my fave of the boys. He's just fun. 

My biggest critique is that they sidelined both characters who maybe could have calmed the girls down. Denise is barely in the book because she tells the girls they're too old for a teacher crush and she basically has such secondhand embarrassment for them that she can't be around them. Then there's Lucy. Lucy is too smart for this shit, so what does the author do? Pretty much leaves her out of the entire thing. 

I did think it was funny that all the girls think Mr. Rochester is married and his wife's name is Edna, but only Nora and Jen know that Edna is his cat. They make some great comments in a couple different scenes about this without ever letting anyone else know Edna is just a cat.