Screwed -- Laurie Plissner

Rating: ✰✰
(2.3) 

Mesmerized by Nick, the cutest guy in school, seventeen-year-old Grace Warren, captain of the math team, gets pregnant the night she loses her virginity. Still hopeful that Nick is madly in love with her, Grace ends up heartbroken. When she tells him about the pregnancy, Nick not only couldn't care less about her, he wonders aloud if the baby is his. Desperate, Grace turns for help to her super-religious, strait-laced parents, and is stunned when they not only insist that she get an abortion, but, when she balks, literally kick her out of the house. Taken in by an elderly neighbor, Grace must face a choice she knows will haunt her for the rest of her life, whatever she decides. Just when Grace is feeling at her lowest, Charlie, her neighbor's great-nephew, shows up, asking her to try again to believe in human nature...and teenage boys.

One careless decision has changed everything for Grace, and it will take all her courage to make it on her own. But, if she can really trust Charlie's unconditional love, despite all hher fears, Grace might learn to trust herself again. She might still have one shot at becoming the woman she hoped to be.

---

This was a fairly fast read, and the review is probably going to go by just as fast. 

I received this in the mail this morning (yay!) when I was lying in bed half-awake and my brother plopped this heavy package down on my chest with an unceremonious "Here" at 10:11. It was a cardboard, fairly big, and sealed-shut envelope, and at first I thought there was some flap I was supposed to open that turned out to be nonexistent. So, summoning whatever strength I possessed at ten in the morning, I ripped open the top of the envelope thing.

And pulled out the book:

*game show music* It was Screwed! Yay!

Anyway, onto the actual review:

From the synopsis, it sounds pretty interesting, right?

It sounds difficult and a touchy subject that will be handled with grace and make you think about teen pregnancy, right?

It sounds like a book that you will finish reading, flipping over the last few pages to the acknowledgments, saying, "Wow," right?

The writing was something that you would not grow fond of. It was told in third person omniscient, and I don't mean just occasional thoughts from other main characters other than Grace--I mean really really omniscient, where you get everyone's thoughts on everything.

Everything.

How I wish I were exaggerating.

To give you an example:

Basically, Grace, pregnant and back at school, is hiding in the bathroom when four girls come in and she hears their conversation about their suspicions that she's pregnant (it's only been a few months and she doesn't show that much yet, until the day the conversation takes place). It's long and boring, so I won't give you the whole thing, but

Awesome Girl B: "If she's got a kid in there, it had to be an immaculate conception. No one but God could be porking Warren."

Awesome Girl C: "Whatever."

Awesome Girl C didn't give a rat's ass what a charter member of the geek squad was up to when she wasn't changing the batteries in her calculator. In her thousand-friend Facebook universe, high school was for looking good, getting hammered, and hooking up, not gossiping about losers who sat in the front of the class with their lips permanently attached to some teacher's ass.

 

You never even see "Awesome Girl C" again for the remainder of the entire book.

 And now itty bitty small useless details like that about EVERY freaking character's life is going to be permanently ingrained into my brain cells!

ARRRGGGGH! I DON'T CARE! I DON'T CARE ABOUT ALL THESE MINOR CHARACTERS' MADE-UP, SHALLOW, PATHETIC LIVES!

This was the biggest issue I had with the book.

You see, I am very protective of my brain cells, because one, I do not have a very bountiful supply of them, and two, I certainly do not want them being clogged up with useless information when I could be using them for something actually helpful in life that I need, like, say, information to help pass the SATs, or my grandmother's birthday.

I also have pretty good memory, so I remember a lot of things from books, like a lot of minor details.

So of course I get pretty pissed off whenever there's so much going on in a book that I just don't freaking care about but I have to waste up space in my brain's storage to read over anyway.

Every few paragraphs I would get some random person's entire backstory, their opinions on everything, and their reasons for existing and life in general. This took up paragraphs and paragraphs, and sometimes even entire pages. And he/she is never to be seen again!

GAH!

Now I'm stuck with Nick's freaking plans with Amy (which are really gross and not age-appropriate for me, and also took up a whole page to explain--seriously?), Helen's entire life story (which I couldn't care less about, sorry Helen), "Awesome Girl C"'s philosophy on high school...

I'll spare you all the other grueling, minor details.

I just don't understand why Laurie Plissner would do this at all. Why? Why, Miss Plissner, why would you do this to yourself and to readers everywhere?

Was she trying to prove her world was very thoroughly developed? Did she want to show off that she had beautiful character development? Did she want to brag about how three-dimensional all her characters were?

Well it didn't work.

It slowed down and dragged all the progress of the story so much, especially when after a simple sentence like "I like your hat" (just deal with me here, I'm not going to go back looking inside that book), you would get the person who commented on said hat's entire backstory and ALL their reasons for saying that one simple sentence.

I could deal with it the first 80% of the book, but after:

Another thing about the writing was that it was very bland and just...bleh. I'm not even sure why. But despite all this "character depth" on everyone, you never really feel like you're there in the story, you don't get inside Grace's head much, you just...don't care.

The writing just drones on and on and on. It would be a chore to read, except it just never stops or starts, just goes on, so I kept reading and reading. It wasn't compelling, just...I guess I really had nothing better to do than read this for five hours. The prose wasn't terrible, or outstanding, just...

Sigh.

Trust me on this, the writing in here is so freaky in its "boring readability," but not enough that you would want to torture yourself reading it.

Grace as a main character I could stand, but near the end she started annoying me with her weird motives and messing with Charlie's mind, and that weird thing after, well, she gives birth.

I wish the fate of her baby had turned out differently (even though I guess it's for the best), and that's about all I can tell you on that without giving away too much.

The whole plot, if you can call it that, is pretty cliché and predictable, so much that I'm not sure there was even a plot or a point to the 300 pages this book takes up.

Everyone kept calling Grace "special," seriously, for no reason, and after a while without even an infamous explanation for it, that annoyed me, too.

There were two weird scenes between Grace and Charlie I'd rather not tell you about because they're kind of creepy. (Also, Charlie, by the way, is a really bland, "good boy" love interest, who's really stereotypical, except for the fact that he's Jewish. Really, think of "preppy good boy" and you've got Charlie. His motives were sweet, I guess, but his love for Grace wasn't really that believable, especially since they'd only known each other for a little over six months.)
 

I wouldn't recommend this book.
 

You're probably wondering why the heck I gave this book a 2.3 rating then.
 

See, sometimes at the beginning of a few chapters there would be a letter from Grace to her baby. I thought these were really adorable and so sweet, and they showed how much Grace cared about her baby, and I even started looking forward to them after the first one. Sadly, they were stopped almost as soon as they began :'(
 

And the ending was really cliché, but it was a sweet cliché, and I like those. I base a lot of books on how their endings make me feel, so if you can stick in a sappy romantic scene that's pretty much another added star rating from me.

Yep, bottom line, don't read this book unless you really hate yourself.


But thank you so much to the publisher for sending this book to me! (I think. Or maybe I should thank the person who listed the giveaway on Goodreads? I'm really not sure who to thank...)