Reviews

Dateable: Are You? Are They? by Justin Lookadoo, Hayley DiMarco

sondosia's review

1.0

I was looking through my Goodreads shelves and realized I never reviewed this horrible book that I read as a teenager back in 2006. Yes, it was 11 years ago and I still remember it, because this book is straight-up Christian propaganda masquerading as Cool Life Advice For Teens. (I still remember the part that said that you should never share a bed with your boyfriend/girlfriend because you JUST MIGHT have sex and that's obviously bad. "You're not 'sleeping together,'" the passage read. "You're just SLEEPING TOGETHER." Wow, it's almost like the same phrase can mean totally different things!

Anyway, what pisses me off the most about this is that these types of Christians are always trying to sneak their sexist, bullshit ideology into everything without warning. A Jewish atheist kid shouldn't be able to pick this book up off the library shelf and have no idea that it's going to be a blatant attempt at proselytization. Yuck. Libraries shouldn't buy this crap.

jen87's review against another edition

3.0

Some good advice about dating, some sexist. My daughter is reading it with her church group so I wanted to see what was what. I like the emphasis on young women spending time developing their talents/gifts while they are young and unencumbered and not mooning about/obsessing over boys since these relationships are so fleeting anyway. However number one, there should be some sensitivity to the fact that it doesn't FEEL fleeting, and, they do portray young men quite negatively and to the point my 13 year old all but asked 'really none of them are nice?' That's not right.Any overgeneralization of one gender never sits well with me. Some good take away advice, some plugs for modest dressing, but in the end a book never takes the place of some good old fashioned advice from Mom that elicits much eye rolling from the target teen :)