In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Skin
  • Deborah Stevenson
Vrettos, Adrienne Maria Skin. McElderry, 2006227p ISBN 1-4169-0655-X$16.95 R* Gr. 7-12

Jealousy is a common enough experience in everyday life for most people; this book of original short stories, plus a quiz and a poem, provides examples of some of its more ordinary manifestations. In these stories, girls are jealous of other girls because of their money, poise, or past or potential relationships with boys. A girlfriend is jealous not so much of her boyfriend's car but of his desire for a car, and what the desire means to their relationship, which has always been about walking home together. A boyfriend is obsessively jealous of his girlfriend, a trait she mistakes for love until it goes too far. Finally, boys are jealous of other boys because of cars, fame, literary prowess, and, er, that other sort of prowess that seems to matter so much to boys. The main problem here is one of audience: there's an adult sensibility to the project in general, with many stories imbued with retrospective knowledge, and the variation in protagonist ages (the preteen age of the first protagonist will blunt the interest of the book's likeliest readers) confuses the focus further. Most stories, though, will resonate with the high-school set dealing with similar entanglements of their own, while the paired offerings by Ned Vizzini and Marty Beckerman hit a twenty-something New York hipster-angst ethos that has a certain aspirational appeal. The list of jealousy resources is more weirdly random than whimsically varied, including book suggestions that range from the Berenstain Bears and Madonna's The English Roses to an essay from Granta, movies from Disney's Snow White to Mean Girls, songs from REM to Kermit the Frog, and an exhaustive list of Crayola's shades of green. Individual stories will likely work better than the collection as a whole, but browsers may appreciate its quirky edge.

...

pdf

Share