From Publishers Weekly
A major blunder by the unknown, eponymous football player at a Penn/Cornell game stirs feelings of doubt and instability in Rebecca "Beck" Lowe, a Penn sophomore and the general life-of-the-party, resilient heroine of this spunky but rudimentary debut. Though her physical features "will never add up to cuteness," Beck is "the fun one... who keeps the buzz going," scoring well both in fraternity bars and in class, often attending one right after the other. A pseudo-panic sets in as the fumble resonates for Beck, and she begins to scrutinize the many facets of her second year of college: her volatile relationship with her parents, the ongoing frenzied frat bar search for Mr. Right, her nagging virginity. For much of the book, barfly Beck (equipped with fake I.D.) busies herself taste-testing such potential new boyfriends as the elusive Ryan, who lies about his age and never calls; the bighearted Trey; or sweet, attentive Scott. Despite the heroine's forays into hip, collegiate self-analysis, Solar-Tuttle's account of this fruitless bed hopping never develops into something bigger or deeper. The author graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, magna cum laude, and though she confidently relates the cliched college scene of excessive drinking, sordid sexual escapades and self-exploration, that's all the book has to offer. As a novel, this translates into a conglomeration of silly, eventually tedious misadventures. Even younger readers won't laugh so much as wince at this toothless, adolescent fluff, explicitly tailored for undergrads whose steadfast mantra is "anything's possible when you're drunk." Agent, Alice Martell.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
For Ivy League student Beck, life is just bars and parties, with occasional classes or papers (on which she always gets As). So when Number Six on Penn's football team fumbles the ball, why does she feel so sad? Something about the incident stirs up buried feelings, like the weight of her parents' high academic expectations and her friends' assumption that she always be "up," coupled with the fear that, sooner or later, she, too, is going to drop the ball. Beck spirals down into depression, causing rifts with roommates and leading her to look for comfort with booze and boys. Solar-Tuttle's gently satiric depiction of college life captures the special world of 19-year-old students--from their slang and speech patterns to their "incredibly deep" insights, the kind that will seem very elementary to their future selves. College students and recent grads will relate to Beck's attempt to forge an identity separate from her parents and true to herself.
Beth WarrellCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
