"Saving Mr. Terupt" by Rob Buyea

Indubitably this book wasn't as good as the first two. Bleh. The only people I would want to associate with here are Luke and Jessica. I mean, I know teenagers are supposed to be rash and impulsive, but we aren't this rash and impulsive. Are we? Am I just well-grounded or something?

 

So anyway, in this book the main characters are in... *drumroll* high scohol. If you listened to my rants about Alexia, you know why that's a recipe for disaster.

Speaking of Alexia, she still uses "like" as, like, a comma sometimes, but she's gotten better about it. I no longer have to skim her chapters due to that. I now have to skim her chapters for other reasons. Alexia chapter time was a ratio of about 25% reading to 75% putting the book down and sighing "alexia... yeesh" exasperatedly. 

But she doesn't fall in with any more baaaad influences this time! That was good. 

Y'know how in book 2, I said there were a lot of layers that didn't always intersect with each other? That happens here too. There's a layer of both Alexia and Peter running for class president (|though Luke wins|), and it turns into a sort of boy-main-characters-versus-girl-main-characters thing. 

Also, and here was my least favorite part of the book, {T15+one get-together of theirs somehow results in their playing spin the bottle.} I have obtained a high-quality GIF of Luke when that happens:

 

If it doesn't show up for you, just click the white space.

 

Attaboy, Luke. This is where the quote at the top about rash and impulsive teenagers came from: my mind when I read that scene. Luke's reason for noping out of there (hey look! I just verbed "nope"! And verbed "verb!") is approximately "Dude, we're screwing around with real feelings now. Not funny, guys."

 

Also, Danielle |gets diabetes. The Type 1 version, which we apparently can't get rid of yet. (We can only sort of get rid of Type 2 anyway.)  Now, I don't know much about diabetes, but she seems to cope all right. The school nurse freaks out, though, which was sort of darkly funny|.

In the vein of |surprise medical maladies|, Alexia's mom |gets breast cancer|. This contributes to her (Alexia, not the mom) becoming increasingly unstable and weird. 

Both of the above incidents caused me to put the book down and exclaim "The what?". Since I was reading this while in the car with my family, they started looking at me funny the second time.

Okay. I'm done with the spoiler tags. We're not turning this into another Mr. Terupt Falls Again review.

I didn't like this book much. This may be because I had to skim a lot of it; Saving Mr. Terupt deals with problems real teenagers have (I think; I'm not a girl, so I have no reference point for that.) Unfortunately, this means problems (mostly biological) that it's uncomfortable for me to read about.

Less romance than in the last one, though! Woot.

I'm giving this thing three stars, mostly due to one moment of concentrated awesome near the end (I lied about the spoiler tags): |Luke organizes a sit-in to protest the school firing Mr. Terupt. The principal gets very angry and attempts to expel the president of the oldest-people student council as an example. "I am Spartacus" ensues.|

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: Skirting the line of T15+ and M. Not a book for younger people.

As with Buyea's other books in this series, this one didn't provide me with favorite lines.