Friday, September 14, 2012

Diminishing Paige by Robert Shields


Genre:  Adult Contemporary

Description (taken from Goodreads):
She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth totally catching him by surprise. Her warm lips erased any symptoms of being cold on the bridge, yet she froze him in place. It was wonderful, but it was over in a flash and he thought, "I never kissed her back."

A fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing is the romantic theme between Paige Wheeler and Storm Lancaster. The intelligent high school expellees serendipitously meet at a garage sale and end up approaching sex in an awkward text book fashion. They start viewing the relationship through the lens of economics as if sex was a commodity.

As they grow closer together, Paige’s promiscuous past comes to light that haunts her, which leads to complications in their relationship. Storm’s ineptness in handling the pressures of a relationship from previously attending an all-boys school causes problems while Paige finds some amusement in his immaturity. Her sterilized view of sex creates consternation for Storm over their rapport.

At their new school, they make a mutual friend in Jamal. The trio engages in pranks as their friendship with him develops. Storm’s proclivity as an adolescent male leads to poor decisions with Paige as Jamal, often the voice of reason and conscience is ignored to the detriment of the couple.

Emotions spin out of control after a frolicking camping trip with Paige’s old high-school buddies and the sexual economics experiment explodes.

The tagline: A fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing is the perfect tagline for this book.  Meet Paige, the cliche "it" girl who has everything.  She's the kind of mean girl you love to hate because she's got the looks and she somehow manages to snag guys left and right.  However, deep down, she's just as insecure as the next girl.  Meet Storm, your average joe just trying to fit in and survive high school.  With a chance meeting, they become friends and deal with life, relationships, sex, and emotions in an odd way.  This book has a few twists and turns, some expected and some not expected.

In the beginning, I was put off by Paige.  I mean, what kind of girl out there is so straight-forward and confident enough to talk about sex with mere acquaintances?  It's almost as if it's how guys wish girls would attack the subject but girls just don't (i'm generalizing, I know).  But she really grew on me because she is a girl with issues.  And even though I don't have her confidence at all, I feel I can relate to her struggles in life. And her fascination with economics is a little weird, but it worked.  While reading this book, I felt like I got an economics lesson without the pain of learning economics.

On the other end of the relationship, we see Storm: a guy who's very inexperienced with relationships.  And it seems that Paige kind of educates him on relationships and sexual matters while he tends to bring Paige back down to everyday life.  So somehow, these two work well together.  And as their relationship grew, their characters grew on me as well.

This short story is a contemporary tale that weaves economics into everyday relationships.  And it's something I'd recommend to more mature audiences looking for a good afternoon contemporary.


Thanks goes to Robert Shields for providing me a review copy.

1 comment:

  1. Great Review and good insight of the book. I appreciate you taking the time to read and review my book. You do a wonderful job with your site. If anyone has a question, please feel free to ask me.

    Thanks,
    Robert

    ReplyDelete

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