A review by nagam
Geek Girl by Cindy C. Bennett

5.0

What an under-appreciated book this is. By a show of hands (or comments), who has heard of this book? It doesn’t have half the attention it deserves on Goodreads and oh, does that make me even happier to share it with you guys.

Jen dresses to stand out in a crowd – tight, black clothing, ruby red lips lined with black lip liner, dark hair with red chunky streaks. She’s a girl who is not easy to overlook. Imagine Trevor’s shock when she sets her eyes on him and starts popping up everywhere he is. Little does he know that he’s a bet. If Jen can pull him over to the dark side, her friends will pay to have her lip re-pierced (her current foster family made her remove the last piercing). I wonder if Jen would have made the bet if she had known in her (fake) pursuit of Trevor, she would spend so much time skipping parties with her friends so she could watch sci-fi movies with his geeky crowd, or that they would be spending every third Saturday hanging with semi-senile old people in a nursing home.

Jen gets sucked up in Trevor’s world. I don’t know what girl could resist this boy. He’s kind and funny and so honorable. For a boy who wore button-up shirts buttoned all the way to his throat, he was always so kind and polite to Jen despite her in your-face-appearance. He looked past her exterior and saw that maybe that wasn’t all there was to her. Their love was a slow progression; Jen felt so conflicted – how could she fall in love with a boy that she’d be leaving when she went to the next foster home? What would her friends say about her failing so miserably at the bet – wasn’t he supposed to be the one turning bad… not the other way around?

Most importantly, what happens when this good boy finds out why they started hanging out in the first place?

Trevor and Jen’s story is one about falling in love, making it through hard times, deception, and ignoring the haters who don’t believe in you. It’s about a couple, who by appearances, should not be together. Jen’s background is gritty and disappointing; there’s a lot about her past that has caused her to be standoffish and distanced. She has never allowed herself to fall in love before and has a hard time believing someone would actually want her. (I loved her background and life story just as much as her relationship with Trevor. The foster care aspect, what happened with her biological parents, and the current status of her life in the Grant’s home was incredibly thorough and gripping.) Forgiveness is a huge, huge theme throughout this book. I could continue listing so many highlights and strengths of Geek Girl, but I need to allow you to experience this on your own.

I suppose I’ll leave you with this. Sometimes I feel like I’m reading through a 318-page book and it’s gone too fast or details of the story were lacking. I completely, wholeheartedly feel like I know everything there was to know about Trevor and Jen. I loved falling in love with them and hoping against hope that their relationship would make it. I’m so, so glad I took the time to read Bennett’s Geek Girl because I don’t think I could have possibly enjoyed it more than I did.

Now, let’s start a trend on Goodreads and give Geek Girl the love it deserves. Read it, will ya?