Book review: The Lonely Hearts Club

(The Lonely Hearts Club will be the featured book of the month for March here on Novel Novice. Check out this review and then tell us what you think.)

The Lonely Hearts Club by Elizabeth Eulberg

Synopsis:

I, Penny Lane Bloom, do solemnly swear to never date another boy for as long as I shall live. All right, maybe I’ll reconsider it in ten years or so when I’m no longer living in Parkview, Illinois, or attending McKinley High School, but for now I’m done with guys.
They’re all lying, cheating scum of the earth.Yes, every last one of them. Pure evil.
Sure, there are some that seem nice, but the second they get what they want, they’ll dump you and move onto their next target.
So I’m done. No more dating. The end.

Love is all you need…or is it?

Penny is sick of boys and sick of dating, so she vows: No more. She’s had one too many bad dates, and has been hurt by one too many bad boys. It’s a personal choice…and soon everybody wants to know about it. It seems that Penny’s not the only girl who’s tired of the way girls change themselves (most of the time for the worse) in order to get their guys…or the way their guys don’t really care about them.

Girls are soon thronging to The Lonely Hearts Club (named after Sgt. Pepper’s band), and Penny finds herself near legendary for her non-dating ways – which is too bad, since the leader of The Lonely Hearts Club has found a certain boy she can’t help but like…

(From www.elizabetheulberg.com)

Review:

After reading the above synopsis, I thought , Great, this is going to be a gimmicky, man-bashing diatribe.

And it easily could have gone there … but it didn’t. (And the Beatles thing wasn’t gimmicky – it totally worked.)

Penny establishes the club in order to focus on herself to figure out who, exactly, that is, before she falls into the familiar trap she’s seen time and again: Girl meets boy; girl molds self to make boy happy; girl loses sense of self and abandons her friends.  

It quickly becomes clear that Penny’s message resonates with many other girls and the club grows. Outsiders become fearful and mistake the group as a man-hating estrogen-fest (including the principal) and this is where Eulberg shines. She meets every criticism with level-headed common sense. It’s not about hating guys, it’s about loving yourself and supporting your friends.

The result is a well-crafted, funny, realistic celebration of young adulthood that, in the end, neither generalizes (there are good guys worth waiting for) nor lets them off the hook for bad behavior.

In fact, one of the best scenes of the book is when Penny finally realizes the boy she’s been crushing on her entire life (since they were toddlers) is a jerk, plain and simple. She rips him up one side and down the other, a scene only rivaled by Chevy Chase at the end of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” 

The reader will want to give her a standing ovation.

FINALLY, we have a Young Adult book with present, supportive parents — but no vampires, no fairies, no werewolves, no fallen angels. Just real people facing real issues, with realistic dialogue complete with swearing (mild, of course) and realistic sexual situations.

Bravo!

My only criticism is that you’ll have Beatles songs stuck in your head for days afterward. Goo-goo g’joob.