A review by finesilkflower
She's So Money by Cherry Cheva
4.0
Liked:
* Smart writing, with realistic and funny dialogue for high school nerds: sometimes clever, sometimes random, judiciously peppered with profanity.
* Plot twists and turns, and well-done uncertainty about what was going to happen.
* A surprisingly smart business model. For some reason I really dig YA books about running a business (see: Baby-sitters Club), but a frequent failing is that they overlook ways to make their business run smoother, or fail to go into detail about how it runs. The cheating ring gets complex enough to be satisfying, while running smartly enough to reflect well on the intelligence of its creators. It even features some good ideas I didn't come up with first, such as writing "I have syphilis" in highlighter pen on the completed homework so that the purchasers are forced to recopy it in their own handwriting before handing it in.
* A minimum of tired moral angsting about whether cheating is wrong, until the very end (which felt tacked on anyway, so you can kind of ignore it).
The only problems I had were at the very end. Several rather unbelievable events comprised a happy ending whose over the top goodness belied the reasonable realism of the rest of the book. I would have respected the book more if
Despite a few missed tricks and a bit too fairyland-romance of an ending, the book was a highly enjoyable, well-written and well-put-together high school dating/business/cunning scheme story.
* Smart writing, with realistic and funny dialogue for high school nerds: sometimes clever, sometimes random, judiciously peppered with profanity.
* Plot twists and turns, and well-done uncertainty about what was going to happen.
* A surprisingly smart business model. For some reason I really dig YA books about running a business (see: Baby-sitters Club), but a frequent failing is that they overlook ways to make their business run smoother, or fail to go into detail about how it runs. The cheating ring gets complex enough to be satisfying, while running smartly enough to reflect well on the intelligence of its creators. It even features some good ideas I didn't come up with first, such as writing "I have syphilis" in highlighter pen on the completed homework so that the purchasers are forced to recopy it in their own handwriting before handing it in.
* A minimum of tired moral angsting about whether cheating is wrong, until the very end (which felt tacked on anyway, so you can kind of ignore it).
The only problems I had were at the very end. Several rather unbelievable events comprised a happy ending whose over the top goodness belied the reasonable realism of the rest of the book. I would have respected the book more if
Spoiler
(a) the skeevy guy didn't turn out to be secretly scrupulous, or at least didn't turn out to be secretly scrupulous in EVERY WAY, or if (b) the main character didn't have a sudden uncharacteristic crisis of conscience requiring all of her friends to turn into supermen to get her out of the hole she dug. There were also missed opportunities to (a) redeem the spurned blackmailer and not totally fall into the "ugly people are bad, pretty people are good" dichotomy; and (b) show the underachieving business partner getting better at school through cheating, when business got so good that he actually had to take on some of the work.Despite a few missed tricks and a bit too fairyland-romance of an ending, the book was a highly enjoyable, well-written and well-put-together high school dating/business/cunning scheme story.