Sloppy Firsts & Second Helpings

By Megan McCafferty.

Published in 2001 and 2003 (respectively) by Three Rivers Press, New York.

Megan McCafferty's wit is the kind of razor sharp that makes me shudder at the fact that I am calling it razor sharp. It deserves some non-cliched description, and I feel entirely inadequate in trying to come up with one. Let's just say her writing is incredibly smart and incredibly funny.

The Jessica Darling series follows (quel surprise) a character named Jessica Darling. Sloppy Firsts opens as she celebrates her "bitter sixteen." Her best friend has just moved across the country, and she feels completely alone. To make up for the fact that her sole confidante has disappeared, she records her life's ups and downs in a journal. The novel charts her year, which includes an imposter who has arrived to write a tell-all about life in a New Jersey public high school and a strange attraction to her school's burnout druggie.

Second Helpings opens a year after Sloppy Firsts ends. Jessica has started a new journal, this time for a summer arts program where she is studying creative writing. Her relationship with the burnout druggie (Marcus Flutie, who is actually a very smart guy who has put abused substances behind him) is over, and everything in her life is up in the air. She is in the midst of deciding who she is, instead of just going along with who she has been (and who her parents want her to be).

I don't actually have that much in common with Jessica. I am not 16 (or 17, or 18), I was never the smartest girl in school, and I'm definitely not an insomniac track star from New Jersey. Still, Jessica is so insightful, so wry and yet awkward, that I feel a strong connection with her, one that I'm sure many other readers (from all over, of all ages) also feel. Megan McCafferty has created a character whose thoughts are so easy to slip into they feel like my own. I laugh out loud. Often.

The Jessica Darling series doesn't end here. Two other titles have been published, and a final, fifth book (Perfect Fifths - which finds Jessica in her mid-twenties) is due to be released April 14th. I love that young (and older) women have a character like Jessica, who is so perfectly (imperfectly) herself, to guide them (us) into (and through) adulthood.

10/10.
Ages 13+.