Party

I'm an adult reader and I really enjoyed this book. I'm from The Breakfast Club era and this book has a lot of similarities to The Breakfast Club. It is the story of 11 teenagers all attending the same end-of-the-school-year party. Different chapters are told from the viewpoint of different characters, but not every one of the 11 teens gets his own chapter, and not every character is covered as in-depth as the others. There are the group of for boys, one of whom is Josh, who plan to get drunk and hopefully hook up. But Josh won't drink and he won't hook up, either, because he just broke up with Morrigan. Josh is definitely cool, but his religious beliefs keep him from having sex and drinking. Because he's cool he still has a lot of friends and they don't give him a hard time about it. Morrigan and Ashley are best friends. Morrigan's parents barely notice her. She reminds me of the Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club. Not because she's a freak, but her parents ignore her. She's starving for some attention and affection and thinks maybe breaking out of the house to attend this party will finally get her noticed. Morrigan is so love-starved that she broke up with Josh because he wouldn't have sex with her. Instead of being flattered that he respected her, she just saw it as another person withholding affection. Morrigan gets totally wasted at the party but Ashley takes care of her. Beckett used to be a normal teen and best friends with Ashley, but when her mother got sick with cancer, it changed her. Now she's basically a high school hermit. She hasn't even told anyone that her mother passed away and she's living on her own. She's running out of money and plans to drop out of school to get a job. Although Beckett thinks she's invisible to everyone at school, that's not true. Max has had a secret crush on her since his sophomore year. Now he's graduated and this party is his last chance to try to make his move with Beckett. That's if she even shows up to the party, which seems highly unlikely given her loner status. Azize is an immigrant from Turkey who works at a coffee stand and just wants to make his parents proud and do the right thing. He decides he is going to go to the party and make at least one new friend. Right now Beckett is pretty much his only friend. They occasionally discuss comic books in the library. Anthony "Antho" Lincoln is the school's football star who had a bit of a slump the last half of the season. It turns out he is old friends with Ashley, Morrigan and Beckett. Antho has a lot on his mind, like Beckett. His brother was injured fighting in Iraq. After having too much to drink, he looks at Azize and sees a "towelhead" like the ones who caused his brother's injury. He just goes off on Azize and this pretty much brings the party to a halt. This book is so real feeling. The teen dialogue is spot on, the drinking and hooking up is accurate. The Iraq references, also, make it very cu

It's a summertime Saturday evening, and an enormous house in Santa Barbara is packed to the gills, inside and out, with hormones, alcohol, and high schoolers. The photo-shopped invite had been tacked up around the high school corridors before summer vacation began. This is the party that everybody has been waiting for. We view the evening's unfolding events through the eyes of eleven students -- most of them incoming seniors; a few others newly graduated -- who bring their individual hopes and desires, prejudices and points of view, angers and appetites to that house on Beachfront. Containing a healthy measure of sex, tunes, beer, and violence, this is the one that my eighteen year-old plucked from the piles as looking especially entertaining. I'm betting that it will be one of those books that will be embraced and shared by any number of reluctant teen readers who are fortunate enough to run across it. When I picked it up, I was figuring it would be a tasty bit of junk food for me to consume on a quiet Saturday night at home. But I actually found PARTY to be far more than that. I was surprised and impressed that after reading these eleven intertwined stories upon which the evening builds, I could readily recall in depth who every one of these eleven narrators is. There are lots of secrets and surprises about which we come to find out. And, because the book takes place over this single night in the lives of each of these eleven complex characters, I am really wanting to know what is going to happen tomorrow with every one of them. Don't miss this PARTY.