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Have you seen Popular gracing the shelves of your local bookstore? I picked it up, because it's been all over mine, along with the reissued copy of Betty Cornell's Popularity Guide, which Maya relied on for advice. Not only that, but Maya is in a bunch of teen magazines and even got a movie deal. I had to see what the hype was about. Popular is an enjoyable, quick read, but I also found its premise somewhat troubling and thus finished it with mixed feelings.

The basic premise of this book is that 8th grader Maya follows a popularity guidebook from the 1950s. Each chapter of the book reflects a month Maya spent focusing on a particular part of herself to change. Things like hair, makeup, weight, posture, and eventually personality.

My first complaint is that this book is focused so much on altering one's appearance. Semi-spoiler: Maya concludes that her increase in popularity over her 8th grade year is actually due to working on her personality - on being open and nice to everyone. So the message of beauty from the inside is there, but doesn't get as many pages.

I wonder what I would have thought of this book when I was 13. Maya looks and sounds like a very typical awkward 8th grader. In fact, with her glasses, braces, dark hair, and a tan complexion, she looks so much like me in 8th grade that it's almost scary.

As an 8th grader, I desperately wanted to be popular. I literally dreamed about it. As an adult, I realize that 8th graders are inherently evil, surpassed only by the cruelty of 7th graders. If she'd given herself a year or two, she would have found a comfortable social home without having to change herself. Also, she did have a best friend at the start of 8th grade - a time when I had 0 friends. They are still friends at the end of the book, but not as close. I think she should have appreciated what she had rather than looking for something better, a mistake I often made as a teenager.

I wish the book had given us greater insight into what Maya liked to do for fun other than try to become popular and write. I learned more about her from the book flap than I did the book itself. Rather than portray herself as a normal, geeky girl, she tried to tug at our heartstrings by playing up all the bad things that were happening in her life. It's the downfall of many a college applicant. Regular life is too boring, so you have to make everything seem like life or death.

She tells us about the illness and eventual death of a teacher. She tells us about the death of her infant sister 8 years prior that apparently permanently changed her psyche. She tells us about lockdowns at her admittedly scary-sounding Mexican border-town school. At all these things, she describes herself as crying. This girl cries so freaking much. I am not as sympathetic to her tears as I should be, because I felt like she wrote that she was crying, because she's not a good enough writer to adequately describe her emotional state. If she was indeed crying as often as she said, I hope her parents took her to a doctor because that's not normal. My middle school experience (apart from various deaths) was a lot worse than what she described and I didn't cry nearly that much. She needs to develop a thicker skin.

On the plus side, the book was very readable, fairly well-written, and quite amusing. I particularly liked that Maya didn't present herself as a fairy tale transformation. Not all of her changes were received well. In fact most weren't (honestly, she looked so ridiculous in her attempts to dress "classically elegant" that 8th grade me would have laughed at her too). It seemed quite realistic. Also, Maya seems like a cool girl with a good head on her shoulders. She was going about this with good intentions. I can't be too hard on her for that.

Popular is a book worth flipping through to see how 1950s advice can be translated to the modern day. Plus it'll take you back to 8th grade - a year that I'm sure all of you would love to relive. I can't fully support it, because I dislike the idea that Maya needed to change herself at all and also wish she'd told use more about herself instead of focusing on the irrelevant drama in her life.

Also, I can't shake the feeling that this is a publicity stunt. Doing something weird and then writing a memoir about it is a popular choice these days, but I don't know that it's wise to thrust a teenage girl into that position. Plus I wonder if the book was at least partially ghost-written. I didn't see a reference to a writing assistant, but I'm always suspicious. I wouldn't buy this one, but definitely grab it at the library or skim it at the bookstore and let me know what you think!

Rating: 3 / 5