How to Buy a Love of Reading

It's $16.92 in hardback at Amazon, $9.99 to put on your Kindle, and $13.12 for your Audible audio player. But I got mine from the library, and to the library it (the book--not the love) will soon return.


Interesting premise in a nutshell: a teenage girl's nouveau riche father rents an author, hoping to (a) impress the neighbors, and (b) commission a book that will inspire in his non-bookish daughter a love of reading.

There are aspects to this book I really enjoy, including its wit and its playful riffs on/with postmodernism while remaining blessedly reader-friendly. The character of the daughter, also, is truly likable. As a reader I enjoy discovering the surprising layers to her superficially bland character, and root for her to become the strong person she has the potential to be. If I were going to continue reading the book, it would be for the sake of the doubtlessly satisfying developments in this area.

But I am not going to continue reading it. I'm on page 175, a little less than halfway through. The plot is moving slowly, and I feel like I've read passages that impart the same general information or mood again and again. As in the second Twilight book (which finally extinguished my interest in the series), a lot of time is spent on anguished teenage nail-biting and soul-searching. The conflicts, social milieu*, and secondary characters are largely uninteresting to me.

There are so many underlying good points, though, I will probably check out the author's next book.

* I've spent my share of time socializing (read: drinking) with teachers at a private school in the Hamptons. They describe kids like this novel's teens, whose enormous disposable incomes and minuscule parental presence have had predictably deleterious effects on the kids. So I know first- (okay, second-) hand that these situations happen. But...this book didn't really make me care.