Review: Jersey Angel by Beth Ann Bauman - Juhina

Title: Jersey Angel
Author: Beth Ann Bauman

Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books

Publication Date: May 8th, 2012

Genre(s): Young Adult (Contemporary)

Challenges: Debut, A-Z title, Contemporary, SARC

Source: NetGalley
Format: Digital Arc

Pages: 208

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It’s the summer before senior year and the alluring Angel is ready to have fun. She’s not like her best friend, Inggy, who has a steady boyfriend, good grades, and college plans. Angel isn’t sure what she wants to do yet, but she has confidence and experience beyond her years. Still, her summer doesn’t start out as planned. Her good friend Joey doesn’t want to fool around anymore, he wants to be her boyfriend, while Angel doesn’t want to be tied down. As Joey pulls away, and Inggy tours colleges, Angel finds herself spending more time with Inggy’s boyfriend, Cork. With its cast of vivid and memorable characters, this tale from the Jersey shore is sure to make some waves.

I was really looking forward to Jersey Angel, but I had my doubts when the word “Jersey Shore” was linked to this book. I really do NOT like that reality tv show and its people but I still hoped it would be a fun, summer read. Boy, was I wrong. This book has nothing to do with anything except Angel getting it on with every guy she ever made eye contact with, and get this, she is PROUD of that. I mean, setting aside how wrong this is and the message it sends, I don’t think this is YA material in my opinion. I mean if you are looking for the moral of the story? I don’t think there is any, because for one, there is no character development, the Angel (yea that’s her name) at the beginning of the book, is the same one at the end, oh but she’s even worse. She somehow found it in her mind that it is fine to cheat with her best friend’s boyfriend AS LONG as she ’didn’t find out, because if you look at it 30 years from now, we will all be laughing at the time I cheated with her boyfriend’. Yes, I summed up her mentality regarding cheating. 

Oh, can I point out she is only 16? There was a scene in the football field where she looks at all the guys she has slept with one by one as if she’s ticking off a checklist and you sense that THIS is her accomplishment and goal in life. This book is wrong in so many ways, I definitely wouldn’t want my younger sister to read this and see how frivolous the protagonist is and how this book was one step away from being an adult book. There is even an explicit scene between her and her best friend’s boyfriend. I really can’t stress how misleading the synopsis is and how wrong the message sends about what normal life for girls of that age.

Overall I did not enjoy this book one bit, I actually have a lot of problems with the overall ‘moral’ of the story and what it is trying to teach the young adult community, which if some may have forgotten, DOES contain YOUNG adults, and not just us old people who still read YA. I am really disappointed in this book and honestly wouldn’t be recommending it to anyone at all. 

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