Joyce Carol Oates does YA! I liked this book a lot. The YA-ness of it made me pretty certain that it wasn’t going to be as over-the-top creepy as some of Oates' other stuff, and I’ve been on a YA kick lately. The loose story outline is about a loudmouth kid who gets in trouble (or set up) for “threatening to blow up the school.” The resident weirdo jock girl comes to his aid. They deal with a lot of crap from school and parents. Things somewhat resolve the way things in high school always sort of do, meaning not really and not definitively.

The story is told in alternating chapters, third person with Big Mouth and then first person with Ugly Girl. This is not difficult to keep up with and gives the story some depth especially when you’re looking at these kids and thinking “Why did he/she DO that?” it doesn’t have a lot of dangly parts that don’t make any sense. If I had one criticism it would be that all the supporting family for these kids seem a little two-dimensional, first bad, then good, then possibly bad again. This may be due to the fact that we mainly see the family through the eyes of the teenagers, but sometimes it’s tough to see them as fully formed characters the way two main teens are. This is a warts and all YA book that does manage to deal with complicated teen issues without feeling like an issue-oriented book.