BOOKS: How to Buy a Love of Reading

"Extraordinary Coming-of-Age for Modern-Age..."

HOW TO BUY A LOVE OF READING
by Tanya Egan Gibson
(Plume Paperback/Penguin Group, August 2010)

[Paperback, 389 pages, $15.00 U.S. - Review copy provided by publisher.]

"Carley wanted to feel a story, be in it the way TV let you--laugh and cry and not analyze--instead of think it the way...every English teacher she'd ever had said you had to do with books." -- page 109

I loved the concept of this book: Nouveau riche parents in a wealthy (fictitious) enclave of Long Island hire an author to live-in and write a novel for their dear daughter's Sweet Sixteen -- to, literally, buy her a love of reading (since she's a reality-TV junkie and "never met" a book she liked), and also to impress the Joneses in their exclusive, incredibly snobbish community.

As a parent, author, teacher and book fanatic, I appreciate the challenge of engaging the electronic media generation in an appreciation of -- even a cursory interest in! -- the written word. So I loved the concept. I read the book. I hated the book. At first.

Initially, I was thrown off by the upscale setting and tabloid lifestyle, the blatant image-consciousness and stereotypes of horrible adults and their spoiled offspring. It was so overdone (I hoped). The characters were so cruel to each other, relationships and circumstances so messed up and dysfunctional. The book-within-a-book and reality-TV scenarios were so layered and complicated. I hated it. However, by the end of the first read, I was drawn in by the characters, especially 16-year-old Carley, her tenuous self-image and her tragic relationship with her golden-boy best friend/object of lust and devotion, Hunter Cay.

In 10 years of reading and reviewing books, I have never done this, but I gave it a second go and as I re-read, I loved it. The second time through, reading with a different perspective, thinking of kids these days, I understood better who the characters were and where the author was taking them. I found it quite brilliant.

How to Buy a Love of Reading is a coming-of-age novel for the modern-age: Books v. TV v. Life. Although our main character, in the beginning, hates books, she spends a great deal of her time in a world of make-believe and re-editing, what she calls "Afterstories," where she can re-work the plot of her life and make things work out the way she wants. Carley's great breakthrough comes when she begins to understand other people and life through the stories they offer the world, whether written or not.

In the end, I love Carley, her friends and mentors (but not the adults/parents in her world): three damaged writers and a girl who hates books, but loves TV, especially reality-TV.

"i get ur point about how people can't save each other for real.
but I still think we need stories that tell us we can.
Just so we won't stop trying."
-- Carley, page 351