YA New York

Today is Maureen Johnson’s birthday. Happy birthday, MoJo! Your most recent book lifted me right out of Brooklyn and plopped me down in Oz. Or, more accurately, into the fairy tale version of New York where Scarlett Martin and her wacky family live.

Here is what you folks who may be reading this here blog should know about Scarlett Fever: It is the second installment of a series of novels about a 15-year-old girl (named Scarlett, natch) whose family owns a rundown NYC hotel. In the first book (Suite Scarlett), our heroine got a job working for a crazy lady (crazy awesome, that is) named Amy Amberson. Mrs. Amberson is very wealthy, very eccentric, and — I almost hate to admit this — very cool. She’s also a former actress who has just started her own talent agency, and in this second novel she has Scarlett running around town trying to keep the talent happy.

Meanwhile, our protagonist is starting a new school year, hoping maybe things will get back to normal now that her family’s hotel is no longer home to an off-Broadway production of Hamlet. But … the Martins don’t do normal. Their hotel is empty, and it’s looking more neglected with each passing day. Elder sister Lola and elder brother Spencer are both feeling poor and unsuccessful, which means they both do absolutely idiotic things to improve their lives. Younger sister and cancer survivor Marlene is being oddly nice; if you’ve read the first book you know that Marlene doesn’t do nice any more than the Martin family does normal. To top it all off, Scarlett’s BFF Dakota has had to resort to threats to keep our heroine from spending all her time looking at pictures and videos of her summer crush.

Maureen’s series is like The Hotel New Hampshire (a great novel by John Irving, which spawned a not-great movie with Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe) minus the death and sex. It’s like MoJo channeled Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary), Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally) and John Irving all at once. In other words, it’s wonderful.

So what are you waiting for? Go! Get your read on. And when you’re all done, come back and tell me about your favorite part of MoJo’s latest. I personally am in love with the rat-dog known as Murray, but I won’t say more, because I don’t want to spoil anything for the uninitiated.

Much love,
brina

Tags: maureen johnson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.