Meg Cabot again

When my mom arrived from the US early this year, I finally got the two Meg Cabot books I’d mooched from the US, and I finally got around to reading them: Pants on Fire and Airhead.

I’ve been reading Meg Cabot for what seems like ages now, and she’s a steady choice for my chick lit fix, judging by the fact that one layer of my shelf is filled with her books.  I have some favorites among her books (All American Girl, Every Boy’s Got One and The Boy Next Door); some I didn’t care for (Heather Wells series, the Princess Diaries after book 5, Nicola and the Viscount, Victoria and the Rogue); some I found horrid (Ready or Not) and some I don’t want to read at all (Mediator series and the 1-800 series), but all in all her repertoire is a good mix for girls of all ages — hip and easy-breezy books perfect for vegging out on the couch on a lazy Saturday afternoon (or procrastinating on a weeknight for that matter!).

Pants on Fire (original title: Tommy Sullivan is a Freak) is a YA novel that gives a lesson on honesty. Katie Ellison is smart, pretty, popular, and in the running for Quahog Princess in her town’s annual pageant. She appears to lead the perfect high school life, but she has more than a few secrets up her sleeves: the fact that she’s juggling two boyfriends, and what really happened on the night her best friend Tommy Sullivan left town.

Then Tommy Sullivan moves back to town, and Katie has to tell more lies to keep her cover. But as Tommy slowly draws out Katie’s true personality, she begins to see that a perfect existence is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

This small-town story is quite similar to another one of Meg Cabot’s books, How to be Popular, though I liked that one better. Katie Ellison doesn’t start off as a likeable character, partly because she isn’t an underdog like  other Meg Cabot trademark characters, and the two-timing episodes and all her lying portray Katie as a two-faced skank. Reading further into the book shows us she isn’t so bad, really, but it does throw the book off balance.

Tommy Sullivan, though, is one of Meg Cabot’s better guy characters, who has a lot more than hotness going for him, especially when you learn why he really left Eastport that fateful night. He actually makes me wish Meg Cabot would explore the idea (since she’s keen on trying everything in the YA chick lit field) of writing something from a guy’s point of view.

It’s not a bad book, but it’s far from Meg Cabot’s best work.

And I’m not a fan of mixing chick lit with other genres, but Meg Cabot has a number of books involving the paranormal, mythology, psychic powers, and detective thrillers, none of which I really liked. Airhead has a bit of sci fi in it: Emerson Watts,  sixteen and a plain jane, tech-geek tomboy, gets into an accident at a cd-signing event at the newly-opened Stark Megastore, and wakes up to find herself in the body of teen supermodel Nikki Howard. Hold your breaths, it’s a brain transplant!

Apparently, the only way to save her life was to transplant her brain in Nikki Howard’s body, a multi-million dollar operation that Stark  has financed to keep their number 1 endorser.  The catch is that Em is declared dead and has to live the rest of her life as the glamorous Nikki or have a lawsuit and a lifelong debt slapped on her family.

Of course it glosses over the transplant details because that really isn’t the point of the book. Ludicrous as it sounds, it is a teen escapist fantasy, and when you give in to the suspension of disbelief, it’s actually quite entertaining. I didn’t expect to like it, but Em manages to draw empathy as she deals with the changes in her new life.

It’s a good start for the series, with a lot of points for development in the next books — how Em will let her best friend Christopher that she’s really alive (and that she loves him!), how she grows into being Nikki Howard, and how she’ll take down the evil Stark (eventually, hopefully?). At the risk of sounding like a teenybopper wanting to be in Em’s shoes, I’m actually looking forward to the next books in this series.

Oh, and I just found out Princess Mia has her own blog — totally hilarious, I was laughing all throughout the Oscars wardrobe commentary involving Mia, Grandmere, Lilly and Tina.  I think I’ll put POG on my blog roll!

***

Pants on Fire, hardcover with dustjacket, 2/5 stars

Airhead, hardcover with dustjacket, 3.5/5 stars

Books 51 and 52 for 2010

[amazonify]::omakase::300:250[/amazonify]