It is, perhaps, the eternal question: Are the Youngs getting stupider? It’s impossible to answer, of course, but these days, the answer feels more like yes and yes and oh, hell yes. You can throw general blame towards the Internet and television all you want, but the fact is, nothing makes kids more stupid than hurling concepts at them they can’t understand (irony, advanced sexual politics, any literary reference outside of the high school canon whatsoever) and voila! The kids try to imitate what they see on Gossip Girl, only instead of winding up with the wry, winning dispositions on that show (written by 30-year-olds, we’re assuming), you get your 14-year-old cousin’s Sad Lolita MySpace page that is equal parts slutty/sparkly/functionally illiterate. Sigh loudly with me, and not just because this is your future babysitting pool, my new and pre-breeder friends. So you kind of have to hand it to YA fiction (that’s “young adult”) author Diana Rodriguez Wallach, whose new series Amor and Summer Secrets pulls a classic move from the Pretty In Pink playbook: Girl from wrong side of the tracks masquerading as something else on the, er, “right” side of the tracks. The wrong side, in this case, is Puerto Rico, and the “right” side is — wouldn’t you know it — the Main Line! If you need a visual aid, you can check the trailer here, but for those of us still comfortable with text, it’s like this:

Red haired, ivory-skinned Mariana has every intention of spending her summer attending Sweet 16 parties in Philadelphia’s Main Line, until her father expresses other plans. He ships her and brother off to spend the summer with faraway relatives in Puerto Rico, who don’t speak English or own an air conditioner. Mariana’s summer is sent into a tailspin she wasn’t prepared for, or so she thought. Soon she discovering family her roots may be fun after all. But her new friends and romantic entanglements are nothing compared to the dark secrets she unlocks while trying to survive her summer vacation.

If you spent all weekend watching Exiled like we did, you already know that this kind of thing seems to be the zeitgeist right now: The kids are just at the point where they finally realize the olds are (rightfully) laughing at them/ruing the future, but they just need to figure out why. And if that kind of navel-gazing seems precipitous of the concepts beholden to the dreaded Chick Lit genre, well, you’re not far off, Encyclopedia Brown: Rodriguez Wallach is literally neighbors with Philebrity phave Jennifer Weiner. It’s all a bit much, but on the other hand, we kind of wanna pick this tome up, if only for the veiled references to Food Source and Ruby’s Diner.
DianaRodriguezWallach: XOXO Swarthmore Girl

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 11:21 am.