Customer Reviews

Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the lighthearted title, this reader expected Violet's story to have plenty of moments of humor, and the author does not disappoint. Violet's Hollywood dad left her mom for a starlet, and she and her younger sister now have two step-sisters, a less-glamourous lifestyle (in Canada), and Violet has a plot to get her mother out of the rut of dating weirdos, and on to something better. I'm glad to say that in the end, Violet realizes there is a benefit to substance over style, and George Clooney (as much as Violet ever gets to know him) turns out to be a great guy.

NOTE FOR PARENTS ON WHY 4 STARS: I guess I'm keeping my head in the sand about what tweens are up to, as the 12 year olds in this story are indulging in "retail therapy", Facebook pages, hearing about their parents' flirtations and affairs and inviting each other to school dances. I wish Violet had been 13 or 14, but that's just me. Violet plays a mean joke on her stepsisters that didn't come off as funny to me.

I thought this book was very clever and enjoyed it a lot, but my daughter really loved it.

12-year-old Violet is dealing with a lot in this book -- new stepsisters, her mom's new boyfriends (none of whom she likes), and just all the things that go along with middle school. When her mom starts dating Dudley Wiener (whose personality fits his name!), Violet decides to take things into her own hands, and write George Clooney a letter. This book is very funny, and in some ways Violet is a typical tween girl, but it's not really a middle grade novel. I would recommend it for 12 and up for some mature content, including some of Violet's actions that need some maturity to discern, as opposed to the 9 - 12 that is the middle grade category.

Reason for Reading: I am fond of the publisher, the cover caught my attention and the summary sounded original. It didn't hurt that the word "George Clooney" was in the title either!

What an amazing little gem of a book! I absolutely giggled with delight as I read about Violet's dilemma and what lengths she goes to. Converse-wearing 12 yo Violet's parents have been divorced for two years. Her TV producer father left them for a trophy wife, who was expecting twins and off they moved to LA. Violet's mom took it hard and spent the first 6 mos. going through a change, pierced navel, drinking too much wine but she got out of her slump and took up the single life with a passion, always dating, looking for the new Mr. Right. Only problem is the men are all losers. Cheaters, married, kid haters, cheapskates, etc. and Violet knows her mom can do better. She's even been known to spy on the boyfriend with her best friend Phoebe, looking out for her mom's best interests. But when her mom starts to seriously date Dudley Wiener Violet knows it's time to intervene and since her mom actually met George Clooney years ago when she worked on-set doing hair touch ups and had a personalized photo of him, Violet plans a campaign to get Clooney to meet her mother again and perhaps she will be the one who will break his rule that he will never get married again.

The story deals with some serious issues but is light-hearted and hilarious. Violet has an attitude, and understandably so. She outwardly hates her father for his desertion of her and her little sister, she is protective of her little sister and feels she needs to watch out for her mom, while at the same time she has sworn off boys/men altogether except that oh, so cute Jean-Paul has started paying attention to her. Not a popular kid at school, she's mostly a loner but she isn't one to let other's push her around so she's often getting into trouble both at home and at school. She punches the most popular girl at school in the nose when she calls her mom a skank, she disses a 5 yo girl in her sister's after school daycare when she calls Rosie dumb, she allows her two half-sisters to eat cat poo and she has a phone conversation with her dad only responding with Magic 8 ball answers. These are just some of the antics you can expect from Violet, but none of it is done mean-spiritedly. I fell in love with Violet right from the beginning.

It's tough for Violet getting used to her Dad's glamourous LA lifestyle and new family and adjusting to her own new middle class life that may just include a dumpy, balding man called Dudley Wiener. But through it all, with the help of her eccentric but youthfully understanding mother, her mother's best friend, her own best friend, her psychiatrist parents and yes even, her dad, his new wife and Dudley she gets through this tense, hurtful stage of her life.

Susin Nielsen has written a book that is both poignant and witty. This was a can't put down book for me that I read quickly and yet didn't want it to end. It would be fun to meet Violet again sometime as she seems to be the type of person who will be up to antics all her life, whether she starts them or they happen to her. Lovely book, Violet is a memorable character in literature that will stay fondly with me.

Dear George Clooney is a book set mainly in Vancouver, Canada and is written by a Canadian author. This is a rare thing for YA. In fact, I can't think of any other modern books set in Canada. Plenty in the US, Australia, and the UK, but not Canada (nor in New Zealand, South Africa, or Ireland, if we're covering the English speaking world). It was a very quick read. I think I blazed through it in less than two hours.

It was frustrating, heartwarming, bittersweet, and cute all at the same time. Frustrating because Violet does some really stupid things. For all her stubborness and cruelty toward her mom's new boyfriend, her father, her half-sisters, and her step-mother, it was hard to hate Violet. I really felt for the poor girl. Her world was spinning out of control. So many adults in her world had hurt her and her mother. Her actions were just a way of trying to gain control of her life. But it was hard to see her doing everything to destroy her mother's new boyfriend, Dudley Wiener, who, despite an unfortunate name, seems like a pretty loveable guy.

I really loved Violet's character even though I didn't feel like I got to know her that well. I don't know what she likes to do in her spare time or her favorite color, but at the same time, I understood her psyche. The adults were also portrayed very realistically. There was no hiding the flaws of her cheating father, her frazzled mother, or her trophy wife step-mother. However, they weren't portrayed as one-dimensional characters. We see hints of goodness in the bad characters and saw the bad sides of good characters. The other supporting players in Dear George Clooney, such as Violet's sister, best friend, love interest, and her mom's friends were all relatively flat characters. This isn't that big of a deal - the book wasn't long enough or of a wide enough scope to warrant an exploration of their personalities.

The genre of Dear George Clooney is tricky. Violet is only 12 years old. And in many ways, she acts like a 12 year old. This would make the book seem more appropriate in the MG/Tween genre. On the other hand, the book contains a few swear words and insinuations that are more appropriate in YA. Ultimately, I think the book belongs in the YA genre. It would probably be appreciated most by young teens, who would be less likely to be turned off by a 12 year old character.

Rating: 3.5 / 5

I didn't realize when I got this book through an early reviewer program that it was a style of YA/kidlit I don't favor, so I'll try to be generous.

The main character's mother is dating again (ugh) after her divorce. Naturally, she keeps going after the wrong people. If she's not going to take their father back (and admittedly, the guy married his mistress, that's not going to happen), she should at least pick somebody better than all the losers!

Really, the plot goes where you expect: Mother's latest loser isn't so bad, Protagonist makes her peace with her parents, a few funny things happen, and we all learn something.

I don't see this one as being any more memorable than most of the books out there for kids, but that's not a bad thing - it's middle-of-the-road.

To really show you just how wonderful this book is, I would pretty much have to reproduce its entire 229 pages here, which would probably get me sued. So I won't do that. But I am going to share some of my favorite passages with you. Truth be told, I highlighted almost the entire book, so even picking out favorite passages of my many, many favorite passages has been a chore. I'm going to limit myself, therefore, to passages from the first half of the novel so I don't spoil too much for you. Because seriously, you've got to read this book.

So let's start by taking a look at the opening line from Dear George Clooney, Please Marry My Mom:

FOR THE RECORD: I did not mean to send my two half sisters to the emergency room.

Now that's a hook! From the first sentence Nielsen grabbed me by the throat (in the best way) and yanked me into her story. What agent or editor could turn down an opening like that? It's got everything. It introduces conflict, character, and the tone of the novel all in just sixteen words!

The situation here is that twelve year old Violet and her sister Rosie are in LA visiting their dad and his pretty new wife and their new twin daughters. It isn't going well. I try not to hate fictional characters, but I hate Violet's dad. I want to find him wherever he is and punch him in the face. He's a television director and he left the girls and their mother for a pretty blonde actress named Jennica (how perfect is that name?). When the girls arrive, their father and their new stepmother make a big show of paying attention to the new twins and he treats Violet and Rosie like guests rather than his first daughters. See how effortlessly Nielsen captures Violet's feelings about all of this in just three paragraphs of description:

Lola and Lucy were so cute, it hurt. They were just under two years old, and they'd inherited the best of their parents' genes: Jennica's thick blonde hair and big brown eyes, and my dad's chin dimple and megawatt smile.

Rosie and I hadn't been nearly as lucky in the gene pool lottery. Despite having the same father and a very attractive mother, all we'd inherited was Dad's mousy brown hair and his poor eyesight. He wore contacts; we wore glasses. I'd managed to get his big feet and ears, too, and his bulbous man-knees. All these things looked good on my dad, but transplanted onto a scrawny girl like me, it was seriously unfortunate.

We played with the twins for a long time in that sandbox. They adored being with Rosie and me, and I would have loved them with all my heart if I hadn't hated them so much.

What Nielsen does next takes real courage. In response to being treated so shabbily by her father, Violet feeds these sweet little baby girls who never did a thing to anyone cat turds. She tells them its chocolate and laughs as they swallow actual poop. Stepmom Jennica freaks out and rushes the twins to the hospital, thusly fulfilling the promise of the opening line. Now I'm not in favor of feeding children poop, but I understand why Violet does it. I suspect not every reader will. Nielsen takes a real chance of turning some readers off in the first chapter. But by doing so, she creates in Violet an immediately sympathetic character I think far more readers will relate to. After this, I was ready to read about anything Violet did. And although eating poop is gross, the twin girls are fine.

Next, we meet Violet's mom. Nielsen is a master of writing description. She uses plain, straightforward language that doesn't draw attention to itself by being overly lavish. She simply tells us what we need to know, hones in on a few details that illuminate the character, and moves on. She is, in fact, so skilled a writer that if I did not do my reading Ninja style with a highlighter and pen, I probably wouldn't have noticed. That's the mark of a true great; the reader is sucked up into the story and forgets there is a writer. But there is a writer, of course, and just look at what she does here in her description of Violet's mother:

It was her clothes I couldn't stand. She'd started dressing differently after the divorce papers were signed. Her jeans were too tight, and her shirt was cropped to let her stomach show, a stomach that had had to stretch not once but twice to hold babies. A soft layer of flab drooped over the waste of her pants. To top it off, her belly button was pierced--a belated birthday gift from her friend Karen after they'd had a few too many margaritas one night.

Violet's mom is a long way from perfect, but I like her a lot better than Violet's dad. But what I really like is that there are no perfect characters in this book, particularly in the land of adults. Violet's mother does some things readers might not agree with and later in the story some Facebook photos of her looking and acting like, well, a hoochie, I guess, create some major story issues for Violet. Because Violet's mom is doing everything she can to find a man, she gets a bad reputation, and she goes through a lot of loser guys. But Nielsen can tell you better than I can:

As we continued our leisurely descent, I said my little prayer: Dear God, or Allah, or Buddha or Zeus or Whoever-You-Are, please let this one be okay. Please don't let him be a cheater (Jonathan), a cheapskate (Alphonse), an alcoholic (Carl), a creep (Guy), married (Larry), or a general, all-around jerk (Dimitri, Paulo, Jake, Yuri).

I said this prayer even though I'm a cynic when it comes to love because I know that my mother is not. You'd think, after what happened with Dad, that she'd given up on men and found contentment in a life dedicated to child-rearing, hard work, and celibacy. But no. Despite a growing list of epic failures, she had this freakish need to have a man in her life. So she dated like there was no tomorrow, always hoping the next guy would be The One.

Much of the plot centers around Violet going to great lengths to protect her mother and by extension her and her little sister from her mother's loser boyfriends. There are some particularly fun sequences in which Violet spies on the men with binoculars. Finally, Violet comes to the conclusion that she will have to find a suitable mate for her mother and stepfather to her on her own. And who better than George Clooney? Yes, that George Clooney. Violet writes Clooney letters and sets out on a mission to convince him to marry her mom.

Needless to say, George Clooney shows up and saves the day, the end. Or maybe not. I think it's best that I leave the plot description here, lest I spoil too much of the book for you.

Dear George Clooney, Please Marry My Mom has almost nothing to do with George Clooney, so I can repress my deep sense of injustice as a Batman fan for another day. I'm not even going to tell you if George Clooney shows up in the story or not, and it wouldn't really matter if he did, because this book isn't about him. This is a book about families and the constantly shifting definition of what constitutes a family these days.

Let me wrap this thing up by stating for the record that I absolutely love this book. It's everything I want my own writing to accomplish and I'll be studying parts of it for awhile. Nielsen's prose is articulate, but not needlessly ornate, and she employs lots of white space which allows the pages to fly by. She's crafted a great story that is equally hilarious and heartbreaking. Whatever else you do this year, Esteemed Reader, buy this book!

This book is for young teens, but as an adult Clooney fan, I enjoyed reading it!