The Year of Secret Assignments

This book really touches you in so many ways. It has humor but half-believable humor, which keeps you laughing for ages afterwards. Such a great plot, what with all the different types of people writing letters to one another. There is a quiet kind of Romance and as you read the letters you begin to feel the excitement which the characters feel. But as well as the excitement, you also feel the anger, the sadness and the embarrassment that they feel too. It's as if you are in the book, and you're experiencing all the emotions the people have. Hillarious, a good read and thought provoking. A five star I couldnt possibly stop loving, and makes you think about how somebody could ever write a novel this fantastic. 9 Jaclyn Moriarty went to Sydney University, Yale University and then she went to Cambridge inn England. I think she is clever. ) I have already reccomended this book to my friends and they also loved it, I hope you do too - well actually I struggle to see how somebody couldn't enjoy it but I'm dragging on now so I hope you don't hate this book now. sorry. Read it.

yeah i read this book! it was very good. i loved the realistic diary entries and etcetera and the letters that were first sent are very funny and thrilling. and as the penpals and the girls get closer and their relationship develops it is very interesting. of course there's the intriguing matt dunlop who is somewhat of a jerk. the girls attend a school filled with rich children who are well behaved generally. they are made to write letters to students in another school nearby who are corrupted and rebellious. they don't live as full lives as the girls' classmates. so in the beginning they do not think they will relate to each other at all but it ends up, of course, that they are wrong.

Great Book. It's got humor, parts when you don't know whether to laugh or cry, and best of all leaves a place in your heart. it's a must read for everyone

I know that a lot of teenage readers, like myself, are not really into these coming-of-age, growing -up kind of novels. Don't let that deter you from getting your hands on this book though - even I found the characters and plot more engaging then any recent read I can remember. In a nutshell, this book was about three high-school girls - Cass, Lyd and Em - who find new friends through a penpal project in their English class. Lyd and Em have to use every wit and resource they can to try and scrape out the truth about Cass' mysterious letter-correspondent. Actually, the whole novel is written in letters from the friends to their correspondents or in diary entries. This is probably one of the many reasons why I loved this book so much, as it brought out the personality of the characters well and the reader felt as if they were actually talking to them. This exchange of witty personalities made me wish that I really knew these people - they would have made great friends. What really set this book apart from the others, though, was how Jaclyn Moriarty showed a real, honest intention in her writing - mainly, to have fun. Many modern teenage authors try to suck up to an adolescent audience by making their characters stereotypically "cool" - I have read too many corny novels about skateboards, boyfriends and sex. Then they feed in some really cliched moral like "Smoking is bad for you", hoping that highly gullible readers fall for it. Through this novel, Jaclyn not only reassures us that she really understands adolescence, but also reassures us that teenage fiction is not completely lost! I would put her in the same rank as Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca) (Note: In Australia and NZ this book is called "Finding Cassie Crazy")

Lots of laughs, plenty of attitude, mystery, and hijinx permeate this book. Three longtime girlfriends in high school--Emily, Lydia, and Cassie--who are connected through parents who went to law school together, are each required to become penpals with guys in a cross-town school with a bad reputation. The story is told primarily through these letters back and forth, along with some journal entries, and a hysterically funny fill-in-the-blanks writing workbook that Lydia's dad has given her.I'd considered myself pretty waterlogged from the publishers' wave of girl-writes-a-journal books of the past few years, but this is a horse of an entirely different flavor. I'm sure there are some great lessons to be garnered from this book, but, above all, I found it to be a totally delightful read. And the author's background as an attorney is certainly put to good (comedic) use. At first I wasn't sure what more to say about the book. But being away for a couple of days up in the middle of the (cold, snowy) Sierras this week, with nothing to do at night, I found myself rereading it like it was comfort food. And it's as good as leftover lasagna the second time around. For one thing, I caught many of those little clues concerning who did what that I'd missed the first time through. But, more importantly, I understood all the Emily-isms that I wasn't clear about on the first go round. In the same way that non-Americans might find it a bit more difficult to understand the wisdom of Yogi Berra or the rapid-fire dialogue in a Marx Brothers movie, I wasn't sure on the first read exactly what was Emily and what was the English language as it is spoken Down-Under. But the second time I understood what the author has accomplished in creating the wacky voice of this young woman who longs to be a lawyer someday: "I am not saying that this is true. I am only giving a hyperactive situation of how you might give offense."" 'You must have dislocated it. Try looking again.' ""I was just nom-plussed...""I decided to use this opportunity to practice my handwriting. As you can see, I am developing a highly eloquent style.""Anyway, I didn't believe that for one millimeter...""They have very sun-dewed light so you look attractive in the mirror...""I think this is a "play" on Thompson, which is my last name. I think it is an angiogram of Thompson, actually.""I can't explain how beautiful the singing was because you can't write music.""We need to cook on the element of surprise.""It's immortal keeping a secret.""...he says that schools which are close to one another should forge ties, and I hope you are as keen as I am to get started with the forgery.""Hyperbole is something to do with graphs. What is it in particular? I don't know. I hate maths.""Also, I have seen on TV that you can get head transplants and it seems to me that it is a tragedy if you are bald and you don't get a head transplant." Bravo for the girls from Ashbury and the guys from Brookfield. I