Results Not Typical, Catherine Ryan Howard
I found this by accident, after someone linked to one of her posts about publishing. It’s a self-published book that could have benefitted in places from a professional editor, but was still a fun read.
It’s a corporate satire that spoofs every diet plan company out there, veering from hilarious to completely over the top on the way. She has five free chapters on her website.
This was on my want-to-read list for ages, and I finally got to it on Friday, reading through it in one evening. It’s a Groundhog Day story. Sam dies in a car accident and relives the last day of her life several times, trying to figure out what she can do differently to make things turn out better.
Sam and her friends are the popular girls at their high school, which is a generic school that actually has popular kids who know who the unpopular kids are. (Maybe it’s because my high school was huge, but there were so many different cliques it was impossible to say who was the “most popular”.) At times it’s hard to sympathize with Sam because she doesn’t always see anything wrong with the bullying her gang perpetrates. Though she does eventually try to do better, mainly because she thinks that will let her stop repeating her last day.
I loved the book, spent the last section in tears, and then sat around after I’d finished it starting to think “but that doesn’t actually make any sense…” At which point I decided I’d better stop thinking about it because that wasn’t the point. It was still fantastic.