Review: Play Me by Laura Ruby

TO BE RELEASED THIS TUESDAY

Title: Play Me                     

Author: Laura Ruby

Reading Level: Young Adult

Bookwhisperer Rating:

Authors Description:

As she's talking to the sales guy, Lucinda slips out of her jacket. Underneath, she's wearing a sleeveless shirt. It's something, watching her slip out of a jacket. It's like she rehearsed it so that it looks completely effortless and without any intended effect. Her exposed shoulders are smooth caps of muscle, singed pink by the sun. I want to touch them, which bugs me. Why would I want to put my hands on her? This is not a girl with tattoos on the small of her back. This is not a girl who is cool with it.

Eddy Rochester has a problem.



It's not his TV-star mom, who skipped town with a creep and appears on Crime Scene: Miami in tops cut so low you can see all the way to China.



And it's not his dad, who's nearly pines himself into a box for Eddy's mom, or his stepdad, who pines right along with him.



And it's not his little brother Meatball, who stages his own death daily with the help of knives and tomato sauce.
It's not his movie-quoting friend Rory -"We've got armadillos in our trousers. It's really quite frightening" - or his pumpkin-faced rival, Joe Meyerhoff, who thinks Eddy's just a user who's slashed and burned his way through every girl in a fifty-mile radius.



It's not his hit online show, Riot Grrl 16, or Gina, its unpredictable star, who has threatened to rip out his heart and feed it to her dog.



And it's not even all those other girls, because he never makes promises he can't keep.



No.



The problem has a name: Lucinda. The name means light – and we're not talking sunbeams, we're talking lightning bolts. With Lucinda, Eddy's not in the driver's seat. But maybe, this once, he's willing to go along for the ride.
This is the story of what happens when a guy looking for fifteen minutes of fame meets the girl who could brand his heart forever.

My Review: Play Me seems like a gothic Dawson's Creek. Although, unlike Dawson, Eddy is quite the ladies man. In the beginning my first impression of Eddy was terrible; he is a young kid that only has one thing on his mind involving every girls pants. Then once Lucinda enters the picture my impressions of Eddy changed drastically. He may be a young man with an overactive sex drive, but I also found him to be a very well rounded character and a genuinely good person that makes many bad decisions. Lucinda on the other hand was a complicated character in my eyes; Eddy's impression of this character sang from the pages, but I saw descrepencies between what Eddy was seeing and what the story was telling me. I felt that Lucinda was very cut throat and a questionably good person. In the end I was comfortable with role that Gina takes on, and Eddy's desicion to seek comfort from her in the end was a very impressive twist. The unexpected trip to see Eddy's mother was quite a shock, but I felt that it was essential to wrapping up this story. This was a good read for the ages recommended, but as a adult that generally loves young adult books I did not find this book to be that great and I can not see myself giving it a return visit.