Lola and the Boy Next Door

We should probably understand something about each other before this relationship goes any further. I dislike hipsters. A lot. I would say hate but this relationship is new and I want you all to think I’m openminded about things and that I’m not a hateful person. I take our relationship very seriously.

Lola and the Boy Next Door is by Stephanie Perkins, who also wrote Anna and the French Kiss, a book I quite liked. So I was looking forward to this book. I read it in about six hours, so obviously this is no War and Peace. Let me break this down for you:

Lola lives in San Francisco and has two gay dads (I smell a sitcom!) She doesn’t believe in dressing like a normal person so instead she dresses like a freak on a daily basis and wears stupid wigs and “costumes” that I wouldn’t let my six year old niece wear on Halloween because they’re so ugly and she’d be bullied by full grown adults (ie: me). Lola is 16 going on 17 and has a 22 year old boyfriend named Max who is in an indie band and seems to not like that he has been cast in this book. Max is pretty cool until about halfway through the book when he is character assassinated like Dean on Gilmore Girls. Lola’s two gay dads names escape me and aren’t important- what is important is that one is a lawyer for the ACLU and the other owns a pie shop- so there’s that super hipster shit.

Here’s my problem with this book- it tries way too hard to be cool. There is too much cool wrapped up in this one person that I can’t stand her. I also can’t stand the characters names. The boy next door in question is named Crickett- I can’t with that. His twin sister’s name is Calliope and she is a figure skater going to the Olympics- I double can’t. We are told in the beginning of the book that Lola is not happy they have moved back to town for girl twin to train with some new coach. She used to be close to boy twin but he did something SO UNFORGIVEABLE that we are not to like him on sight (or from the fact that his name is Crickett). After a lot of build up we discover that Crickett didn’t invite Lola to his birthday party that he lied and said he wasn’t having. That is what broke her heart and made her have a need to drown her sorrows in some stupid indie band even though she should have just pumped up the Celine Dion. We later find that girl twin lied to boy twin by saying she had invited Lola to the party but Lola declined to go. We also discover that boy twin wasn’t lying when he said there was no party- it was apparently a surprise for him since girl twin got all the attention for being the next Michelle Kwan. Also, these people with the shitty names are related to Alexander Graham Bell (again, I can’t).

So Lola starts to fall back in love with boy twin and out of love with Max who wants out of this book. Max started out pretty normal but quickly turns into that guy who runs over your puppy and then laughs in your face about it (Lola has a puppy, its name is Heaven’s to Betsie because Stephanie Perkins is all that is wrong in this world). So she breaks up with Max and then tells Crickett she needs to be “whole again” before she can start dating him. Whatever. This is obviously a ploy in order to make this book 100 pages longer.

There is a side story that is much more interesting about the fact that Lola’s mom is actually her dad’s sister. He adopted her since her mom is a drug addict gypsy who should have her own show because she seems pretty damn awesome. Lola doesn’t like that her mommy is a drug addict and doesn’t tell people about it because she’d rather let people think she was found at the end of the gayelle rainbow just like all the adopted children of gays. It’s sort of like the Cabbage Patch only there’s more glitter.

A lot of other crap happens that I don’t even care about but the bottom line is that this book is hipster even when it talks about not liking hipsters. Lola is like the Annie Potts character in Pretty in Pink if John Hughes couldn’t write movies for shit and Annie Potts were a bad actress. She also talks about not like iPods and wanting to “hold her music” because she’s deep or some shit. Lola is 16 in the year 2011- that bitch doesn’t care about CD’s.

Needless to say, I was very disappointed in this book. It’s a companion book to Anna, and Anna is in the book as a coworker of Lola’s along with the boyfriend she snagged in her book, St. Clair. Their characters have been assassinated as well and they are up each other’s asses 24/7 and can’t live if livin is without you.