Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (Joyce Carol Oates)
What a lovely book! It really feels like JCO does not take young adults for airheads, and wrote an intelligent, not sappy, novel for them. Even though I am not a young adult anymore, this book really appealed to me. OK, it really reads like a JCO novel: the painful Black Girl White Girl comes to mind, and not necessarily the lovely Rape: a love story. But anyways, Joyce Carol Oates tells the story of two teenagers and the different way they deal with the popularity contest that high school is. One is a big mouth who constantly has to show off to everybody and make them laugh to get accepted. The other one plays ugly, becomes a social freak, and does not care what others think of her. Matt gets in trouble because of his big mouth (when something he says in jest gets taken seriously, or so it seems), and Ursula a.k.a. Ugly Girl is the only one who takes his defense. Joyce Carol Oates masterfully conveys what it feels like to be a teenager in high school. Somehow I feel there is so much more pressure to stand out in American high schools than in French high schools. Or could be I feel this way because my sister and I have always stood out because we're twins, and during our last years in high school, two of the few Blacks there. Or was it our natural talents?
Of course, there had to be something I did not like: the stereotype about the Korean-American math wiz who laughs about everything (reminds me of that excellent documentary called The Slanted Screen and Hideki the Average Asian). "(…) he hadn't seemed to catch on to why Matt was resigning." Dumb, does not understand English, or maybe too smart to take high school seriously? I don't know, I did not like it.