After an awesomely bookalicious Christmas, I had some serious considerations to make concerning what book I would use to chime in the new year.  After much hemming and hawing and hand-wringing and snake wrestling, I settled on a wonderful book given to me by a good friend.

TTYL, by Lauren Myracle is a book whose target audience is probably not mid-20s males, however I can imagine that mid-20s males also weren’t the target audience for a certain awesome song.  That doesn’t make them any less awesome or worth reading.   (Or listening to, as the case may be.)

TTYL is written as a series of IM conversations between three girls, Angela (s/n: SnowAngel, preferred font: light blue Comic Sans), Madigan (s/n: mad maddie, preferred font: The Sans Basic 9 Black) and Zoe (s/n: zoegirl, preferred font: Georgia).  Based on the art direction of the book, all three girls use late-model Macs and connect to the internet through a dial-up connection.  This requires that they be offline in order to  call each other.  they’re all within a a few months of turning 16, with Madigan first in line.   They live in northern Florida or Georgia.  The story chronicles the lives of these three tenth grade girls throughout the first few months of their sophomore year in high school and the requisite trials and tribulations.

Spoilers galore.  If you’re going to read this book, go out and buy it (it’s afforable), but don’t read on!

The girls are more or less teenage archetypes: Angela moves quickly from one crush to the next, with each one potentially being “the one” (that she’ll sleep with, not that she’ll marry), and is more concerned about clothes and makeup than the other.  Zoe is the Christian nerd who never strays from what her overbearing mother tells her to do.  Madigan is, from my reading, kinda boring and strives for the acceptance and friendship of the queen bees of the sophomore upper class.  Also, her dad is an alcoholic and she has a job at a local restaurant.  Each of the three has to deal with their own drama that comes from the spot they occupy in high-school archetyplogy.

Angela’s boyfriend (of two weeks) is cheating on her, which she should have seen coming, but is finally in a postion where she can no longer deny it when she spots him at Bennigan’s with the other girl.  Thankfully, her best friends are there to help her deal with the few days between being heartbroken and finding a new crush.  That crush, a sophomore at a local university, turns out to have a girlfriend, which is also heartbreaking.  Fortunately, the story suggests that Angela finally warms to the boy who’s been pursuing her for years.

Madigan is constantly seeking the approval of the biggest star in the sophomore constelltion, Jana Somethingorother, which she slowly starts to get.  The other girls ee that Jana is just using her because she’s going to get her driver’s license soon, but Madigan is so excited by being embraced by the most-in of the in-crowd that she can’t see it.  In the climax of Madigan’s personal drama, she ditches her friends (and aspiring boyfriend) on Halloween night to go to a frat party with Jana, who gets her drunk, resulting in Madigan doing a topless table dance.  Jana obligingly takes photos of the performance and shares them with the entire school.  Madigan cuts off all contact with all of her friends.  She’s pissed.

Zoe’s situation is a little more critical.  She starts going to church meetings with her young English professor, and the other girls tease her about her crush and suggest he’s not just being a mentor but hitting on her.  She denies it, but soon enough they make arrangements to have a night of hot-tubbing, alone.  Zoe can’t figure out a way to back out of the evening without telling her mom that all along she had been lying about her evening plans.  Without knowing what else to do, she goes with the dirtbag English teacher.  Angela is like, totally freaked out, and tells Madigan about it, who doesn’t initially respond to her IMs, but finally sees the severity of the situation.  Madigan drives to Angela’s and together they go crash the hot-tub party, defusing a potentially awful situation.

So, friendship saves them all.  When they make decisions by themselves, they invariably screw up, but their friends are there to save them.  If only they’d have listened to their friends in the first place.

So.  I’m getting a kick out of writing about this.  Mostly I’m being rude and ironic, but I seriously wouldn’t want my daughter or any other young adult to read this. Primarily because it’s crap, but also because the moral lesson is a little unclear.  Not that I can’t deal with some moral ambiguity, but this books kinda seems like its supposed to be didactic, but I’m not sure what the point really is.  I wish one of the girls would have really suffered something other than embarrassment, but I guess embarrassment is enough of a deterrent for the average teen (or pre-teen, more likely) to avoid being boy crazy, going to frat parties, or hanging out with creepy Christian dudes.  Also, there’s plenty of red flags, so maybe the audience sees that.  Like, if it looks, walks, and quacks like a creepy Christian statutory rapist, then it probably is a creepy Christian statutory rapist.  It’s definitely nowhere near as awesome as the quintessential document of teenage-girldom, My So Called Life.  It does have a character named Angela, however I think Madigan is the most like Angela, despite her crisis being much more Rayanne-esque, if only Rayanne-lite(1).

Favorite passages?  Holy canoli, the book is full of favorite passages!  On Angela’s cheating boyfriend:

zoegirl: she ran into rob- WITH TONNIE.  as in, on a date.  angela went to bennigan’s with her mom, and there they were: rob and tonnie, snuggled up over an awesome blossom.(2)

Madigan likes online personality quizzes:

mad maddie: […]so r u ready to discover your own inner dragon?

zoegirl: if i must

mad maddie: go to geocities.com and type in “dragon”-that’ll get u to the quiz.  then report back to me.(3)

What did Angela wear to the bar on her date with Rob?

zoegirl: what about u?  what r u wearing to the dark horse?

SnowAngel: well since u asked.  attire: pink spongebob “bubble bath” t-shirts, jeans, pink clogs, hair in a jillion clippies.  scent: “leap,” from the body shop.  makeup: standard, but with a thicker eyeliner on upper lids for that over-21 look.(4)

If those quotations don’t sell it for you, there’s no hope.

Whew!  Seriously, a fun read.  I started yesterday when I got back from my night at TGI Friday’s.  I probably took two hours or three to read it.  It’s kinda hard to read when they say “u” instead of “you”.  It throws me off.  Luckily, they didn’t stick to IM-verite to such an extent that they included typos, and they were good about proper apostrophe placement.  That much a like.  Final note, before the footnotes, I need to include the blurbs from critics.  The use of ellipsis is potentially telling.  (This book also includes blurbs from readers.  I’ve got a 20th edition of the book, so there was plenty of time for it to be read and reviewed by its core followers).

• “Check out ttyl…the latest innovation.”- The San Francisco Chronicle
• “Myracle captures the banter and shorthand style of intant messaging…teens will enjoy the novelty of its style.”- VOYA
• “Certain appeal…there will certainly be an audience of teenage girls for this.”- Kliatt
• “True to the style of teen communication.”- Teenreads.com

If those quotations don’t sell it for you, there’s no hope.

Footnotes:

(1) The actress who played Rayanne is now like..  titled nobility.  Landed Gentry. That’s pretty cool.

(2) They went on a date at Bennigan’s!  That’s awesome.  They had an awesome blossom!  That’s awesome! Page 80.

(3) Geocities!  I don’t really recall, but I’m pretty sure geocities was already played out by 2004.  Page 71.

(4) I like how she includes her scent.  Leap is no Drakkar Noir, but she’s a girl.  Also, even with some extra eyeliner, can a 15-year old really pass for 21?  Page 38.