The Boy Project: Notes and Observations of Kara McAllister by Kami Kinard
For anyone who's ever felt that boys were a different species....
Wildly creative seventh grader Kara McAllister just had her best idea yet. She's going to take notes on all of the boys in her grade (and a few elsewhere) in order to answer a seemingly simple question: How can she get a boyfriend?
But Kara's project turns out to be a lot more complicated than she imagined. Soon there are secrets, lies, and an embarrassing incident in the boy's bathroom. Plus, Kara has to deal with mean girls, her slightly spacey BFF, and some surprising uses for duct tape. Still, if Kara's research leads her to the right boy, everything may just be worth it. . . .
Full of charts and graphs, heart and humor, this hilarious debut will resonate with tweens everywhere.
Publishes in US:
Genre: feels more middle grade contemporary than ya to me
Source: bought
Buy it: Barnes & Noble Amazon IndieBound BookDepository.com
Find Kami online: site twitter facebook blog book trailer
Whimsical novel about a girl on a quest to get a boyfriend... and an A on her science project at the same time. This whole book is written with charts, graphs, notecards, and she is conducting the scientific method studying boys and girls behavior and what they want in a relationship by observation, and of course she learned a lot about herself on the way.
Even done in this style, we still get a good feel for Kara as well as her best friend Tabbs. They have been friends forever, and I love how their friendship is. Kara has to learn a bit about loyalty though, and she does such a job at swallowing her pain to support her friend, because she knew that friendship should come before any boy. Though I don't understand how she couldn't have been more open with Tabb in the first place and then the pain wouldn't have been there... But I guess that I have been the quieter person in a friendship before, so...
The flirting is all really cute, and I approve of how she was finally successful in her experiment and the other friendships and maybe more that she gained by the experiment.
Though it attempted to put in a few other things that she was interested in--crafting and having good grades... Kara was way more boy obsessed than I think was necessary Maybe it was just because the book was like a journal for the project, but still it talked about other things when not exactly relevant to the experiment, so, I don't know.
But I must say that I loved how present and involved her parents were, and even the teachers. Usually in YA the teachers are just there as almost a prop, but not so for Kara. I also loved the bonding moments with her sister Julie. There was also the bickering and eye rolling, but that just made it authentic for me.
Bottom Line: Fun way to spend a few hours.
My question to you, my lovely readers:
How old were you when you got your first girl/boy friend?
