Title: Cracked Up To Be
Author: Courtney Summers [website] [twitter]
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Source: Purchased
Parental Warning: drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, language, physical and emotional abuse

“Imagine four years.  Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countelss drunken antics, pantsings, spilled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars — every day, a turf war — six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out.  But everything you do here counts.  High school.”

Summary (from the publisher):
When “perfect” Parker Fadley starts drinking at school and failing her classes, all of St. Peter’s High goes on alert.  How has the cheerleading captain, girlfriend of the most poplar guy in school, consummate teacher’s pet, and future valedictorian fallen so far from grace?

Parker doesn’t want to talk about it.  She’d just like to be left alone, to disappear, to be ignored.  But her parents have placed her on suicide watch and her counselors are demanding the truth.  Worse, there’s a nice guy falling in love with her and he’s making her feel things again when she’d really rather not be feeling anything at all.

Nobody would have guessed she’d turn out like this.  But nobody knows the truth.

Something horrible has happened, and it just might be her fault.

Opinion:
Fabulousness abounds in this book about a high-schooler with a bevy of skeletons in her closet.  Parker Fadley is the former popular “it” girl on campus.  She’s dating the hunky jock, she’s got great BFF’s, and she’s just about as happy as any girl her age can be.  That’s until she lives through a traumatic event that changes everything.

What worked for me —

Parker.  She was bitchy and vulnerable and broken in ways that seem to lack the ability to be repaired.  The glory in that is the journey she takes the reader on through her dysfunction and despair.  She can’t find the goodness in herself only the bad and as a result her downfall from popular good girl to rebellious bad girl is epic in the eyes of her peers.  Yet, as a reader I still loved her.  In fact I loved her more for her faults than I ever would have if she remained the “perfect” girl she was before certain events transpired.

The journey.  Summers wrote a fantastic mystery which the reader is constantly left guessing about what truly happened to make Parker change so drastically.  Sure, we knew it was bad, there wasn’t any question about that, but the question that we were always left with was “just how bad is it?”. If self loathing was any indication the events that transpired (which the reader does find out about at the very end of the story) were the bottom of the barrel.

The realism.  While I myself have not been in the situations that Parker found herself in throughout this novel I have to say it seemed pretty downright realistic to me.  Her surly attitude and the rebellious way she acted reminded me of several people I went to high school with.  The fact that it was all a mask to a larger problem only emphasized how true to form it all was.  Parker pushed and pushed until there was practically nothing left to push away.  Yet, even so, she was loved and cared for by those she kept at arms length.

What didn’t work for me –

Nothing.  It all worked for me.  Divine character development, excellent plot building, suspense, mystery, a touch of love here and there — it all wrapped up into a fabulously dynamic novel.  A novel that, despite the darker undertones, didn’t leave me feeling hopeless or depressed.  On the contrary I was hopeful and encouraged.

Cracked Up To Be was not the easiest read in terms of the light and fluffy quotient but I assure you the ride is well worth it.  Summers has won the Cybils Award for Young Adult literature for good reason.