TTYL

I’m prone to exaggeration, I know. But, I may well have found the worst book ever. TTYL by Lauren Myracle, (subtitled Talk to You Later, you know, for people not in the know)

TTYL is a book written entirely in IM conversations between 3 best friends, complete with IM abbreviations and spellings. While annoying, at least it’s consistent. R, U, UR, altho, i c... surprisingly it doesn’t overuse the smileys, and to my dismay, they were actual dingbats and not the punctuation bits--- kids today have it too easy, back in my day we had to look at colon right paren. Not only is the conversation in IM, the page is laid out like a chat box.. Well, more like an imaginary computer on TV from about 10 years ago, but we get the picture, cloyingly. Luckily Each girl has her own font. The quiet one gets an unassuming small serif font. The moody one gets a bold font, and they spent a bit of cash so the boy crazy one gets a blue comic sans. 15 year old whores write in blue comic sans, we learn.

It starts off great (and by great, I mean awful) and by page 2 we’re already into female ejaculation--- setting a tone, and promising us smut that it never comes close to delivering. The girls gossip about school and whatever. And finally their individual story lines grow.

The whore’s is the simplest. She likes an asshole boy, he doesn’t like her, then he does, then he dumps her, and eventually she decides to give the nice boy a chance. Bleh. Heard it a million times before.

The bold one is a bit weird. She’s the oldest, somehow managing to have her birthday in October, so she turns 16 and gets her license on her birthday. And the girl who has always passed under the radar, or was outcast by the popular kids is suddenly popular. And of course the popular kids are bad, and make her do retarded popular kid things. And for Halloween she ditches her real friend to get drunk at a frat party, where she has pictures of her taken dancing around topless, and of course they get emailed to the whole school So, instead of turning to her real friends for support, she shuts down. This is pretty much the cornerstone of YA lit, refusing to open up, tell the truth to the people who will care an understand. Granted, if everyone did healthy things like that there wouldn’t be much YA lit, but really, it just pisses me off.

And of course, the quiet one has the most bizarre storyline. Her 24 year old, Christian teacher helps with some youth group and gets the quiet one to join. He of course, drives her to and from these outings, have very valuable, meaningful, spiritual conversations during the drive. She’s smart enough to realize a crush on her teacher can’t go any further. But the denouement comes as she goes over to the place he’s house sitting at for some time in the hot tub (arrrgh gross, my non-existent maternal instinct is screaming). So, a quick IM from the whore to the bold one snaps the bold one out of her funk, and they go to rescue the shy one. And live to laugh about it, like it’s totally no big deal. And of course they don’t tell the police or anyone that the teacher needs to be put on sexual predator status.

But other than that, it has my favorite kind of ending. They all learn a valuable lesson about friendship, and it all works out in the end.

A book written in IM form is not too different from a diary book. It’s written from the perspective of the girl, as herself, not as a narrator. Lots of back story starts to get suspicious, so the reader has to just pick things up. And I suppose it takes a bit of talent, and effort to write convincing IM that tells a story to an outsider. And I definitely identified with parts of the conversation. I liked how the book took place in the real world, with real pop culture referencesBut, that still doesn’t make the book any good.

The boy who wrote the first review on Amazon is a bit trite, but is also after my heart:

In the future, robot archaeologists will be sifting through the rubble of a long dead human civilization, patiently searching for the ultimate cause of mankind's extinction. After sifting through the remains of our fallen society, searching through libraries and the streets of ghost towns and the insides of long-dead computers, they will eventually find the horrific shout that set off the avalanche that would destroy us.
They will find TTYL.
It will be the first time a robot weeps.


And if you haven’t had enough, there’s a sequel: TTFN