** OK **
Seriously? The Not-At-All-Interestings
In fact : The Downright-Borings
In some ways I felt the author was trying to (badly, very badly) imitate A Secret History (with its slow simmering plotline peopled with eccentric misfits coming to terms with a dark secret). But this was boring, repetitive and superficial, fluffed up with token pop-culture references, full of irrelevant repetitive detail and peopled with caricatures.
By the end I wondered why I had hung in there and finished. What uninteresting characters! What a trivial narrative!
That self-obsessed, centre-of-their-own-universe, trite shallowness of adolescence resonates throughout the book. All well and good for adolescents, except the characters that we meet as teens seem to age chronologically but not emotionally.
We are kept at arms length from the cardboard characters. We are told they are Interestings, full of promise, talented, witty etc but that is only words and their actions belie this. They are boring (Oh, OK, it was exciting when Julie changed her name to Jules! Wowee!!) and one dimensional (Look at me! I'm gay!) and hung up on stereotypes and physical appearances (repeatedly told of the buxom-blond would-be dancer, and eczema-covered love reject, and hunky probable-rapist).
