MotherReader

At midnight I wanted to squeeze in one more short book, but forgot to blog about it in the morning. So here it is now.

I heard about Fly On The Wall in relationship to a contest whereby one wrote an entry with the theme of said title and one could win the book. I wrote the entry, only to realize that the contest had been over for a week. Since then the title has been embedded in my mind waiting for the book to arrive.

Gretchen is a girl at Manhattan High School for the Arts (how many books are set in NYC?) with a crush on a boy. Problem is, she can’t figure out if he likes her at all. She wishes that she could be a fly on the wall in the boys’ locker room so she could figure out what boys are really like. At the same time, her parents announce that they are divorcing and Gretchen has to move to a new apartment. Her mother is offered a trip to the Caribbean with a friend and says she’ll go, leaving Gretchen alone for a week in the house.

Now, Gretchen’s wish to become a fly on the wall comes true. It is convenient that no one is home to notice that she spends a week in the boys’ locker room as an actual fly. How does this happen? Don’t know. Does it matter that no sane set of parents would leave their sixteen-year-old alone in New York City for a week, especially right after announcing their divorce? Apparently not.

So much for the first part of the book. In the second part of the book, she buzzes around as a fly inspecting the private parts of boys and calling them gherkins. The boys also call them gherkins to each other, which I guess is the author’s way of getting around using the cruder names. She has no problem with the f-word, though, because it is used quite frequently in this section. The reader learns that even the perfect boys aren’t so perfect and that everyone’s body is different. Oh, and that boys are sometimes mean to each other and like girls they don’t admit to liking. Notify the press.

There are other dynamics and stuff in this short book, but really, that’s enough. And analyzing boys’ body hair, that’s too much information for me.