Amazon.com Review
Cathy Young, author of the brassy, bold
Favorite Teenage Angstbooks Web zine has finally made her mark on the paper publishing scene as the editor of this stellar collection of teen cravings created to make you blush. In "Someone Bold," Sarah Dessen writes about a former fat girl who learns she deserves better than the first sweet-talking boy who comes along post-poundage. Victor Martinez writes poignantly about how desire can quickly be tempered by divisions of race and class in "The County Fair," and Jacqueline Woodson's story of two girls who loved and lost because of death and drugs won't make you blush so much as weep. And in a genuinely funny turn, Jennifer Armstrong's short riff about a girl whose love object isn't another person, but rather something with four wheels and a gearshift will leave teens helpless with laughter. And that's not all--Norma Fox Mazer, Rich Wallace, Ellen Wittlinger, Nancy Garden, Rachel Vail, Emma Donoghue, and Angela Johnson have also contributed their two cents about pounding hearts and sweaty hands, and the results are a truly strong chain of stories with no weak links. The sexy cover, high-caliber writing, and bite-sized reading pieces guarantee that teens will gobble up
One Hot Second in about one hot minute. Like Michael Cart's similarly wise and provocative collection,
Love and Sex, this is one book that won't linger on the shelf long before teens discover the tantalizing and oh-so-true words that lie within and compulsively share it (pertinent pages tabbed down) with all their friends. (Ages 12 and older)
--Jennifer Hubert
From Publishers Weekly
The title is more titillating than the content of this collection, but there's truth in the 11 sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting short stories. The authors approach the topic of desire from a variety of angles. The main character of Sarah Dessen's "Someone Bold," for example, has lost 45 pounds, but has yet to shed the feeling of being undesirable; in Victor Martinez's "The County Fair," race and class intersect with attractiveness. Three entries focus on gay relationships, and one of them, Jacqueline Woodson's lyrically wrought "Lorena," narrated by a New York City girl whose lover overdoses, is among the standouts of the volume: "[Death] takes away everywhere a little bit of your mind here, someone else's smile there, the quiet beauty of cappuccino with lots of foam in an East Side caf‚." In tonal contrast, the title entry, by Rachel Vail, hilariously catches a ninth grader relating her awkward first kiss and her ensuing nausea over the thought of germs. Other contributors include Angela Johnson, Nancy Garden, Rich Wallace and Ellen Witlinger. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
