Review of It’s Not Me, It’s You
Written by Stephanie Kate Strohm
Published by Point, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., November 2016
From the author of Pilgrims Don’t Wear Pink, Confederates Don’t Wear Couture, and The Taming of the Drew, comes a story of Avery Dennis, your average, independent, and popular high school girl who struggles with finding the meaning behind her past relationships.
Using the form of an interview for an oral history project, Avery Dennis, a senior with a long list of previously dated boys, investigates why her many relationships ended after she gets dumped for the first time by the “perfect” boy. After the surprise break-up, the whole school is buzzing about whether or not Avery Dennis will keep her popular girl reputation and composure. While simultaneously battling with her devious enemy, Bizzy Stanhope, and performing her duty as head of the prom committee, Avery must discover what happened in the past, why she is currently single, and what she is meant to become in the future.
Not only does take a look into the past and recall memories with her exes, she also acquires the help of her best friend, Coco Kim, and lab partner, James “Hutch” Hutcherson, who may be catching feelings for the girl he’s always worked with in school. And it’s a good thing she found assistance, because Bizzy and her evil friends sabotage Avery along her journey of planning her senior prom and completing her oral history project.
The whole interview follows the dramatic scenario of whether Avery will be able to keep prom running smoothly, decipher her past relationships, and end up an independent girl or find a man who she won’t end up dumping.
The title, It’s Not Me, It’s You, has quite the teenager vibe to it, and I think the book follows that vibe pretty well. The book starts out in a “Mean Girls” style, featuring all the random high schoolers idolizing over the popular girl, Avery Dennis. The format of the book, written like an interview, is a little unusual and sometimes hard to follow, but it’s an interesting and effective way to tell the story. I think the format actually helped me feel like I was living in the book, and being a teenager myself, I connected and could relate to the topic of boys, evil arch nemeses, and other high school drama.
The whole book was somewhat a big pile of clichés: the popular girl gets all the guys but ends up dumping them, the nerdy boy who the popular girl is lab partners with is so in love with her and she secretly is in love with him too, but neither admit it, and basically every other popular girl cliché you could think of. I honestly could predict the ending from less than halfway through the book, but I still couldn’t stop reading. The way Strohm adds in curveballs and humor that I could relate to helped turn a simple story into a really funny and interesting book.
I haven’t read any of Strohm’s other books, such as Pilgrims Don’t Wear Pink and Confederates Don’t Wear Couture, but after reading this I would definitely consider it. Her book had me laughing and thinking about how much I could relate to Avery Dennis’s story (or maybe from the nerdy girl’s point of view.)
