How not to be popular by Jennifer Ziegler is about a teenage girl named Maggie (real name: Sugar Magnolia) whose hippie parents don’t like to live in one place for very long. As a result, Maggie is moving to yet another new town and is tired of leaving and eventually losing her friends. So, she hatches up a plan to be unpopular and thus not make any friends at all, but in the end (I don’t think this is a spoiler for anyone) she does.
As a disclaimer, I have to say that I am a fan of adult chick lit, but have a harder time with YA chick lit, mostly because I was not as boy crazy as most of the teenage main characters in this genre. So, in the beginning, I really disliked this book. The main character initially comes across as whiny and snobby–every parent’s nightmare of what their teenager will turn into. But after the first few chapters, the humor of her situation begins to seep through. She obviously loves her flighty parents who are embarrassingly funny and begins to realize how shallow she used to be. Eventually she begins to empathize with her new dorky friends (who sound like the type of people I would have hung around in high school). The novel is obviously not intended to be great literature, but rather a fun, quick read and I think it served its purpose pretty well. While I was reading, I could definitely see this novel spinning off into a teen chick movie in the vein of “Mean Girls”, starring any of the popular teen actresses of the moment.
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