Overview
Meet Andrea Marr, straight-A high school student, thrift-store addict, and princess of the downtown music scene. Andrea is about to experience her first love, first time, and first step outside the comfort zone of high school, with the help of indie rock band The Color Green.
"After I saw Todd Sparrow something deep inside me began to change. It was not a big change and I didn't shave my head and I didn't really think any differently about my life or Hillside or anything like that. But one glimpse of Todd and you immediately realized how limited you were and all the things you could do if you could just break out of your normal existence and stop worrying about what everyone thought."
Synopsis
Meet Andrea Marr, straight-A high school student, thrift-store addict, and princess of the downtown music scene. Andrea is about to experience her first love, first time, and first step outside the comfort zone of high school, with the help of indie rock band The Color Green.
"After I saw Todd Sparrow something deep inside me began to change. It was not a big change and I didn't shave my head and I didn't really think any differently about my life or Hillside or anything like that. But one glimpse of Todd and you immediately realized how limited you were and all the things you could do if you could just break out of your normal existence and stop worrying about what everyone thought."
VOYA
In a relentless first-person teenspeak of thirteen years ago-when Blake's adult novel, now repackaged as young adult, came out-Andrea Marr chronicles her life, beginning in her sophomore year in high school and ending on her departure for college. Influenced by a rock-singer girlfriend, Andrea drops school-centered pastimes for the downtown club scene, forsakes middle-class malls for thrift stores, and develops an abiding crush on a fledging rock star. Along the way, she loses her virginity at summer camp (achieving orgasm her first night out), enjoys intermittent athletic sex with her rocker crush, and shares a brief lesbian encounter. She drinks, tries drugs, skips classes, gossips, tolerates her family, and under pressure to present well on college applications, joins the yearbook staff. Occasionally she studies, making As and top SAT scores. Seldom if ever introspective, events occur for Andrea in an ever-unraveling skein connected ad nauseam by the phrase, "and then." For her "look" is everything; of her crush, she muses, "Was it socially possible that I could be his girlfriend? . . . Would I need different clothes?" The sum of Andrea's experiences is greater at book's end than at its start, but the girl remains unchanged. This reviewer wanted more. She wanted story, but many readers will be enthralled by Andrea's hip, hard-gloss voice and fast channel-surfing life style. Profanity and explicit sex scenes mark this book, even today, a novel for older teens who might find it most readily in a library's adult collection. Reviewer: Mary E. Heslin