Book Review: Jersey Angel by Beth An Bauman

At First Sight: It's summertime in the Jersey Shore and Angel is ready to have fun. Even if every summer starts with her moving to the smallest of the three houses her Mom owns and having to frantically clean the other two so they can be let out to the summer people. 

But that's okay, because for Angel, Summer is the time to live life to the fullest, even if her on again/off again 'boyfriend' Joey doesn't want to keep on their pattern of breaking up and hooking up over and over. 

He wants Angel to be serious about them, but Angel just wants to be free. This often leads her to lots of flirting, sex and even to getting 'closer' to her best friend Iggy's boyfriend, Cork.

Second Glance: Let me start by saying something that you might not get from the cover, Jersey Angel is not really a summer book - it carries on through Fall and Winter of Angel's senior year. 

Also, I have to say that I didn't like this book and came very close to DNF-ing. I know from an editorial note at the beginning of the e-galley that I was supposed to take away from this book that Angel was a independent young woman empowered by her sexuality but really? she was mostly just slutty. 

She gets physically intimate with a lot of people, just because she can, even with her best friend's boyfriend and she doesn't seem to feel much remorse about it. But I began to dislike her way before that happened: when she kept going to her ex 'boyfriend's' house over and over, expecting he would change his mind about hooking up when what he really wanted was a relationship (this happens in chapter 2 so I don't feel bad for saying it). 

And, as we go into Fall and Winter, it seems like the book just goes around in circles without going anywhere in particular. The book felt long which is not good when it's only about 200 pages long, and this was mostly because Angel wasn't very likable. She was the female equivalent of a horn-dog 

Also... the Jersey slang? didn't work for me all that well. And Angel's mom was a bad cartoon at best, for all the parenting she did she might just not been there at all. 

Bottom Line: I wanted Jersey Angel to be a fun, summer book about a fun girl having a fun summer. Sadly, I didn't get that and I ended up quite disappointed. What I liked the most was when Joey talked about cheese. This book comes out May 8th, 2012.

Favorite Quote: "I wonder if I've ever had fancy cheese."

He shrugs, "You probably have a refrigerator full of the usual suspects: American, Swiss, provolone, mozzarella, ricotta..."

"Exactly. You haven't become a cheese snob, have you? American's okay for like a grilled cheese, right?"

"Listen, I can now tell you without a doubt that American has no excuse for existing."

"Mozzarella?"

"No soul. Mozzarella has no soul."

I fake a gasp. "What kind of Italian are you, Joey Sardone?"

"The fancy-cheese-eating kind." 

1/2