From Publishers Weekly
Cooney, in such books as Among Friends and Saturday Night, has explored the many faces of love several times. Here she rolls all her expertise into one book, with a thoughtful heroine who needs to know how she stacks up in the game of love. Kelly actually invents a board game called "Romance," at first for fun and then for a classroom assignment. The game is a success and so is Kelly's love lifeshe gets Will, who was targeted early in the book as the boy to watch. The rest comprises one philosophical question after another: Can there be true love between people who seem more concerned with exchanging frivolous gifts? How can anything on earth be as unfair as unrequited love? What does a girl do about the truly self-centered people among her friends? (Grin and bear them.) This is not new territory to any fan of the romance novel, but Cooney writes with such clarity of her characters' entanglements that she brings fresh perspective to the game. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-9 Cooney again takes a classroom assignment as a premise for a light tale of romance. This time the class is sociology and the assignment is to develop a project on a social issue. Kelly chooses romance, a subject that she is trying to define in her life as well as for her board game. She watches her parents' relationship hit a rocky spot; her brother get discarded by a narcissistic class beauty; and her overweight friend moon over a boy who doesn't return the interest. As she watches the rules of love keep changing, so, too, does her game begin to become more realistic: ``You work at a car wash together'' replaces ``He has his own jet and takes you to Dallas.'' A boy named Will begins to pay attention to her, and Kelly has a chance at a real romance. The story is dotted with several moralistic statements such as ``love is comfort,'' and ``love is an emotion, not objects,'' and the pat ending is as unrealistic as the board game's ``Happily Ever After.'' Yet the progression of Kelly's definition of romance will give young readers some thoughtful entertainment, and the book should be a hit. Judie Porter, Media Services Center, Portsmouth School Department, R.I.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
