Jessica Darling only has one year left at Pineville High. But before she heads back to school, she had to decide about summer vacation. Her father wanted her to go to cross country camp and get ready for her final season. But after her injury last semester, Jessica is less than excited about running. So she chose to be Special—Summer Pre-College Enrichment Curriculum and Artistic Learning.
In Jessica’s program, she could spend her days writing and reading with other creative teenagers, and she is very much looking forward to the intellectual exercise. But then it turns out that her roommate is more interested in studying boys than anything else and the other writers are Goth kids wearing black, writing dark poetry, and sneering at her intelligence. But the instructor, Samuel, is hot, and Jessica spends her journal time going back and forth between writing about him and “He Who Will Not Be Named” (Marcus, Flutie, Jessica’s great heart-breaking love from her junior year).
She is mortified when she realizes that she has turned her actual journal into Samuel (she had a fake journal she’d been working on for the assignment), and while she is so embarrassed to find out that he’s gay, just like her major crush Paul Parlipiano, she’s also thrilled when Samuel tells her that she has genuine talent as a writer. And when she bumps into Paul himself at a coffee shop in New York City and he ends up showing her a little bit of his life now that he’s at Columbia, and she falls in love. Jessica doesn’t think that her parents will want her to go to school in the city, but she can’t think of any other school except Columbia.
Once she gets back home to Pineville, New Jersey, and starts off that senior year, Jessica has a plan. She’s going to keep her head down, not get involved again with He Who Will Not Be Named, write editorials for the newspaper again, run cross country, and get into Columbia. But then the school administration won’t let the paper run her acerbic editorials. She decides to quit cross country. And she starts dating Len, her only competition for valedictorian. Len, who became brutally hot over the summer and started a band with none other than Marcus Flutie. And when Jessica goes to visit her grandmother at the nursing home, she finds out that Marcus works there and has become good friends with her grandmother.
But then it’s September 2011, and the World Trade Towers come crashing down, along with Jessica’s dreams of going to school in New York City. She’s applied to other schools, but none of the others feel as right as Columbia, Jessica is torn between following her dreams and playing it safe. And as if that’s not enough to deal with, there is an anonymous emailer sending out class gossip, the book that had been written about Jessica and her group of friends (Bubblegum Bimbos) is being made into a movie, and her very pregnant sister comes to live with them until the baby is born.
Jessica Darling has a lot going on.
But as she goes through her senior year, taking risks and taming her voice, falling in love and getting her heart broken, getting perspective and getting real, Jessica finds that all she really needs is to stay true to herself, and the rest will take care of herself.
Megan McCafferty’s Second Helpings is an entertaining trip through those high school days. Whether you’re still there, wanting a little escape from your own homework or looking back to remember your friends from a few years away, this novel is like the best parts of your high school memories mixed with the knowledge that the cringe-worthy moments belong to someone else.
I listened to this one on audio, and narrator Katie Schorr takes a good book and elevates it to a masterpiece. There are a lot of characters in Jessica’s life, and Katie does a great job finding ways to differentiate them so it’s easy to keep them straight. But more than that, she absolutely nails Jessica’s intelligent snark, her self-aware judgments, and her big-hearted love of life. I read the first book in this series, and that was a great experience, but hearing Schorr read it takes it to an entirely new level.
An early copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
