Review: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls by Julie Schumacher

Title: The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
Author: Julie Schumacher
Publication date: May 8th 2012
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Age group: Young Adult
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Cover rating: 4/5
Content rating: 3.5/5
Buy: Amazon
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Description:

I'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club. Most of us didn't want to join. My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace. CeeCee's parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car. The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English. But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool. If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe. Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.

My thoughts:

I'm really into realistic YA fiction this year! It's not a genre I used to read in all that often but I'm really liking what I've discovered so far. My tastes tend to run the opposite way to a lot of peoples- what other people find silly/boring/underdeveloped, I find fun, light and entertaining. I was hoping The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls would be one of those light and cute books (the cover certainly suggests it!) and I think it did deliver. 

I really, really liked this book at the beginning! I absolutely adored Adrienne's voice and I thought she was incredibly easy to like. She doesn't really take anything too seriously and her insights on the world around her were really fun to see. She can be quite sarcastic and witty at times which made the book really fun. I liked CeeCee a lot too, even if it was hard to figure her out most of the time. She's more rebellious than Adrienne and starts to drag Adrienne down that path with her. There are a good few things in this book that are not so fun and it does handle darker topics. 

This book is based around a book club that their mothers set up for them during the summer. CeeCee, Adrienne and Jill are being forced into it by their parents but Wallis, who the girls see as a bit odd, decides to join of her own accord. I loved the book aspect of the book! I thought it was really fun to see books I've read being listed and talked about, and it also gave me ideas of other books I'd like to read! I enjoyed seeing their on books such as Frankenstein and The Yellow Wallpaper. 

There are little definitions at the beginning of each chapter and while a few of them were funny, I wasn't entertained by most of them and found them a bit annoying. They were a nice idea but not all of them were fun. There also isn't a whole lot of action in this book so I think that may be off-putting for some readers. I thought it was quite a laid back book but interesting themes running through it. I'm certainly glad I read it and would recommend it to fans of contemporary YA fiction!