Review: How to Buy a Love of Reading, by Tanya Egan Gibson

Gibson's first novel, How to Buy a Love of Reading, is one that I had heard about several months ago on a radio show, before it came out. Despite wanting to read it, I promptly forgot about it after I realized that it wasn't yet available, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it on the library shelf this week.

Reading takes place in a Peyton-Place town on Long Island, where the insecure, overweight, fifteen year-old Carley Wells lives in a mansion with her nouveau riche parents, attending grandiose Sweet Sixteen bashes where artists cast molds of the guests heads as party favors. She escapes the reality of her mother's constant nagging about her weight and the other kids' nastiness towards her through her TV, her Aftermemory, where she re-creates the day's events to her own satisfaction in her mind, and, most importantly, her symbiotic friendship with the town Adonis, Hunter Cay, who is increasingly falling down the rabbit holes of Vicodin and alcohol addictions.

As the title suggests, Carley also hates books, and it is at one of the sweet sixteen parties that her father gets the idea to hire a writer to write Carley's perfect novel, both as a gift and gimmick for her sixteenth birthday. Thus arrives Bree, surly starving-artist-in-residence, and behind her follows the famous local author, Justin, who finally emerges from hiding after a crazed fan's attack years earlier. While we gradually learn the two author's backstories, their connection to each other, and also their parallel to Carley and Hunter's relationship, become painfully apparent.

The main drawback of the story, for me, was the stereotypical portrayal of the characters. It's a wealty town, thus of course everyone is sleeping with everyone else, all the kids - who are more like adults, especially Hunter, who is treated like a thirty year-old by almost everyone in the story - are constantly drinking and taking drugs, and all the women are complete and total harpies. It was a bit like a Jackie Collins novel in that regard, and Gibson conveys their practiced boredom with life so well that I myself started to buy into the idea that everything was tiresome, and was very nearly bored myself at the beginning, just by osmosis.

However, Gibson does an interesting job of portraying teenage thought in various ways, such as the difference between the worldly and somewhat inaccessible Hunter and the much less so voice of Carley. Carley's longing for acceptance, and for Hunter, is palpable; these qualities, as well as her more honest voice, make her unique and sympathetic in a way the others aren't. As Hunter descends into his addictions, becoming withdrawn and erratic, her increasingly desperate attentions to his well-being, and to their future, are dead-on to the dreams a teenage girl that age would have. The novel-in-a-novel that the damaged Bree tries to write to Carley's specifications traces the arc of the Carley and Hunter's relationship in an ironic way that is first almost invisible and then, by the end, all too real. Both of Carley's stories have two endings: the first is written by another character, but the final say is Carley's alone. It is tempting to skim over the included chapters of the commissioned novel, but to do so is to skip the ties that bind the three stories - those in the created novel, Bree and Justin, and Carley and Hunter - together, and remove a level of Gibson's story that raises it above the straightforward.

In all, it is the writing and wording that brings Reading out of the realm of the completely typical. The storyline is fairly predictable, the characters not so unusual, but still there is a tone about it that is different from the usual off-kilter Romeo and Juliet story. Gibson uses the peripheral characters for comedic relief; Carley's father, in particular, is very funny in his growing obsession with flowers, and their resulting staining of certain body parts. Overall, while some sections are somewhat belabored, and the story borrows heavily from stereotypical archetypes, the author's ironic tone and drawstring ending make it a worthwhile read.

Rating: four out of five stars.