Review: The Ivy by Lauren Kunze and Rina Onur

Tags: YA, college

Summary

California girl Callie is about to start her freshman year at Harvard and is ready to take the campus by storm! The trouble is, she feels totally out of her league amongst the beautiful, poised, and well-connected student body. Two of her three roommates, Mimi and Vanessa, know more about fashion and making connections in their left big toe than Callie does. (Her fourth roommate, Dana, is a super-prudish, super-religious Southern girl. Great.)

On top of academics and social mobility, Callie also has to worry about several very different, yet all very appealing guys. There’s Matt, the super-sweet boy-next-door who shares Callie’s interest in journalism; Gregory, Matt’s hot jerkface of a womanizing roommate, whom Callie unfortunately finds herself thinking about more often than she’d like; and finally, Clint, gorgeous, sweet, a gentleman, popular, perfect, and an upperclassman.

What’s a freshman at Harvard to do?

Review

Let’s start by placing my poised, semi-professional reviewer mode aside and putting on the hat of my other half, that of an aggrieved college-aged YA reader. In this alternate, blogging- and review-free world, Steph would say that these sorts of books, these seemingly “in-depth” looks into college life, piss her off to no end. People getting into Harvard, only to not care about academics at all and instead focusing all their time on partying, befriending the right people, and boy drama? Are you serious? How did you get into that school in the first place? I’m so exasperated I’ll probably throw something against a wall (preferably the book and not the laptop upon which I’m writing this). I hate that these types of books claim to portray the reality of college life. Actually, college has become simply another setting for the petty “boarding school drama” YA books, except that, with the elevated age group, you can now talk about sex, drinking, drugs, and more! And you still don’t have to worry about parents! Or (God forbid) classes! Woohoo!

Someone stab me.

It’s along those lines that I absolutely cannot get behind Callie as the protagonist with whom we’re supposed to sympathize. This supposedly smart, talented, and high-achieving au naturelle arrives on campus, only to have her mental capacities reduced to that of a hormonal 13-year-old as she falls into fashion insecurities and obsesses about boys. Oh, but I guess since this book is set at college, this isn’t another installment in the Clique series. Guess I missed that memo. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was part of the 3% in her year who won’t graduate from Harvard.

Callie’s dippiness at odds with her supposed intelligence is reinforced by the choppy writing. It’s unclear what point of view this book is written in. It starts out third-person limited, in Callie’s POV, but then occasionally pops over into Callie’s roommates’ heads before staggering back “home” to Callie’s. Uh, perhaps the authors were trying to emulate a Victorian novel panoramic (i.e. omniscient) narration? I’d have no problem with this, even if it is a risk in the current YA world, akin to third-person present tense, or even first-person present tense sometimes. The problem comes when that intention is not made clear; then the narratorial choice only seems sloppy, the mark of an amateur writer.

As another example of the clunky writing, take any scene from any party where drinks are served and the characters drink. Suddenly, time ceases to exist. Dialogue tags go into hiding. Words become more rhythm and less coherence. Now, all of this could actually be sort of cool, a literary expression of being wasted. But the rest of the narration is not tight enough for this literary exercise to win me over. I mean, sometimes the narrator talks to us, the reader. As in, “As you should know, reader…” statements. As in, something you probably shouldn’t do EVER in fiction, something taught to basic-level creative writing students. Argh.

I could probably go on for longer about the petty plot, or the way one guy in particular is about the only thing I enjoyed reading about in this book (even though, in certain ways, he’s pretty cliché; what can I say? I like my bad boys). But I’ll leave it there. My hope is that reading my review will help you realize whether or not this book is something for you. Don’t get me wrong: I like books set in college, as well as the occasional juicy, Gossip Girl-esque dramas (I have a weak spot for Zoey Dean’s books, after all). But THE IVY was flawed in ways that unfortunately cheapened the whole reading experience for me.


Cover discussion: About the best thing I like about the cover is the tagline (even though I don't believe the book deserves it). But otherwise... what is the impression I'm supposed to be getting from this shiny, foiled cover? It doesn't speak to the scandals, or the glitter, or the drama. It's just... shiny. In a way that the actual story is not.

Greenwillow Books / Aug. 31, 2010 / Hardcover / 320pp. / $16.99

ARC picked up at BEA. Sorry.