This was a very light read for me and I have to say a welcome read as well. I read this as part of the USA by the book summer challenge (as far as I am concerned it is still technically summer somewhere in the world) and this book represented the state of Delaware.

This book is told in the first person by Adrienne. Adrienne for her 11th grade English class has to read 5 books on the summer reading list and has to learn at least 20 new literary terms and include them in an essay that is due when she starts school in the Fall.Adrienne's mother and a few other girls mothers who are included in this book insist that their daughters create a book club so that they can all meet up and discuss the books as the Summer progresses.

The other characters besides Adrienne are three other girls, CeeCee,Jill, and Wallis. Although we do get Adrienne's comments on the other girls because of the essay style structure of the book we don't get a chance as readers to really delve into the other girls' personalities at all. I would love to read another book by this author from the other girls' perspectives some time since all of these girls had a lot of things going on.

Additionally, the books that the girls choose are pretty interesting and besides "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley I have not read any of them.

If you are interested in what the books the club read they are: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin; The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros; and The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

The set-up of this book was very good and as I said the essay style format worked for me since you know this is ultimately what Adrienne turns into her teacher when school starts. It also cracked me up how some of the vocabulary words were used. This is a very good young adult novel and nothing included in here I think would be too racy for kids under the age of 14 or 15.

Can I just say that I would have killed for something like this to be assigned to me in high school? I read like it was my job as a kid and summer was the best time of year for me to just read as much as I want without being forced to go to school and participate in classes I was not interested in at all (looking at you Algebra 2). As soon as dawn broke we were watching cartoons, eating breakfast, and then we were outside all day. We were riding bikes, playing games, wading in the nearby creeks and rivers surrounding our little town. I always used to sneak back into the house and just read. My cousin who lived five doors down from me had different books than I did and I used to take as many as I could carry home and bring them back as soon as I finished them. ( )

I honestly couldn't finish this. I reached the halfway point and I hated literally every single character I read about. I didn't connect, at all, to the main character, Adrienne, but she wasn't nearly as insufferable as CeeCee. I actually wished that they spent more time talking about the books that they were reading, as that was the only interesting part. I just felt that there was no plot and I can't continue with this book. Would not recommend. ( )

Adrienne Haus (A.), in a knee brace after a freak fall at school, has to spend the summer at home instead of on an outdoor adventure camp with her best friend Liz. Her mother, along with three others from a yoga class, decide to hold a mother/daughter bookclub over the summer, covering a few of the titles in their upcoming AP English class. The group is predictably mismatched, but I liked the way the classic stereotypes played off one another and how the books they choose reflected how the summer was progressing. Vaguely set up as Adrienne's summer essay, I also liked how she (well, Schumacher) interspersed the required literary terms as chapter headings. Considering some of the subject matter, sneaking out, drinking etc, I was surprised it still came off as a fairly breezy read, and without every single question being answered. I especially liked the names for this forced book club that the girls continued to come up with throughout the story. And of course, there's Wallis' Rule of Three Thousand, a metric about books read throughout one's life, but I'm confident most of my group will be closer to the Rule of Six Thousand! ( )

This book brings together a mismatched foursome of young teenage girls for a mother-daughter book club. There is CeeCee who is catty and is in the club because she banged up her parents car, Jill whose mother thought she should socialize more, awkward Wallis who actually wanted to be in the club, and the protagonist and narrator Adrienne who had an injured need and a mother who thought she needed to do during the summer. The girls were getting ready for junior year AP English and were not friends previously.

I'm not a big reader of YA lit, but thought this book sounded promising as I needed one placed in Delaware for a challenge. For the most part, the characters were stereotypes you would expect to meet in book about high school kids. Maybe because I'm in a completely different place in my life, I did not find the book had the appeal I was hoping for and was rather glad when the story was finished. ( )

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