Review: Adorkable by Sarra Manning

Adorkable by Sarra Manning
Reviewed by Maggie: May 31, 2012
Published May 24, 2012 by Atom
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J'adork. I know I was just THIS BOOK GETS ME-ing about Holier Than Thou but... this book gets me! Adorkable gets the online me -- the one who tweets and tumblrs and blogs and pins. If the last sentence makes no sense to you, this book may not be for you because one of the things I love about Adorkable is that it doesn't feel the need to explain all that. You either get it or you don't.

Jeane Smith gets it. She's a 17-year-old student and blogger who runs a mini online empire based on all things adorkable. #4 on The Ad♥rkable Manifesto is:

Suffering doesn't necessarily improve you but it does give you something to blog about.

Jeane is smart and sassy. She's Jessica Darling meets Tavi Gevinson. Tavi, for those unfamiliar, is a fashion blogger who at 13 was sitting front row at fashion shows around the world and featured in magazines, including French Vogue. Now 16, Tavi turned her Style Rookie blog into Rookie Magazine and even got Jon Hamm to contribute to her 'Ask a Grown Man' series.

No big deal. Jeane Smith has a million followers on Twitter and is flown around the world too. Tavi and Jeane also both had gray hair at one point.

Michael Lee, on the other hand, doesn't get it. Who cares about online popularity when you're actually popular, right? He's the Big Man On Campus -- perfect looks, perfect jock, perfect family. He's also half-Asian, which made me very happy. The main thing upsetting his life is his girlfriend, Scarlett, who is suspiciously spending a lot of time with Jeane's boyfriend, Barney. And there's nothing adorkable about Barney -- he is a straight up dork. Michael decides to confront Jeane about her boyfriend, and thus begins a series of encounters, both online and in real life.

I freakin' loved this book. At first, I was hesitant about the dual points of view because the male voice wasn't convincing. Michael says something about Jeane's "fugly face" and immediately an image of Regina George popped into my head. Thankfully, this was short-lived and Manning got Michael's voice. The star, though, was Jeane. She was as infuriating as she was endearing, but she cracked me up. My notes at one point were just a series of LOLs.

There are so many things that I loved, but on the top of the list is that Jeane isn't secret pretty, meaning she sees herself as a dork while the rest of the world sees her as some supermodel. This is such a tired trope. Jeane is short with some wobbly bits, and she's totally fine with that. That doesn't affect her sex life because -- NEWSFLASH -- 17-year-olds have sex lives! Jeane says:

I wound myself around him and in that moment I just wanted to be closer still, even if it meant climbing inside him like he was a sleeping bag, which actually doesn't really work as an analogy and makes me sound like some kind of sick serial killer who likes to wear my victims' skins.

There's also mention of female masturbation, which actually is a newsflash to Michael. Oh boys.

Adorkable gets how we interact now and the disconnected connectedness of those social networks. Manning sums up their appeal with this line:

This was what I loved most about Twitter: riffing on utter nonsense with a complete stranger who turned out to be on the same bizarro wavelength as me.

The tone of the high school characters is also perfect, or totes perfect. Adorkable is a cute, contemporary story that won't give you a toothache (copyright: Cher Horowitz). Now read it so we can tweet each other about it!

Rating: 4/5 stars.

For British Eyes Only
Twat count: 4
This is something we do on our Saturday Night Skins sessions on Wear The Old Coat. You can read how it began here.