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Charmed Thirds (Paperback)
by Megan Mccafferty
| Category:
Teens, High school life, Novel |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Jessica is older now; all details just right about of college life, city life and hometown life. |
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Author: Megan Mccafferty
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Pub. in: April, 2006
ISBN: 1400080436
Pages: 368
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BC00324
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400080434
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- Awards & Credential -
Instant New York Times Best Seller. |
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- MSL Picks -
Jessica Darling’s in college!
Things are looking up for Jessica Darling. She has finally left her New Jersey hometown/hellhole for Columbia University in New York City; she’s more into her boyfriend, Marcus Flutie, than ever (so what if he’s at a Buddhist college in California?); and she’s making new friends who just might qualify as stand-ins for her beloved best friend, Hope.
But Jessica soon realizes that her bliss might not last. She lands an internship at a snarky Brooklyn-based magazine, but will she fit in with the überhip staff (and will she even want to)? As she and Marcus hit the rocks, will she end up falling for her GOPunk, neoconservative RA... or the hot (and married!) Spanish grad student she’s assisting on a summer project... or the oh-so-sensitive emo boy down the hall? Will she even make it through college now that her parents have cut her off financially? And what do the cryptic one-word postcards from Marcus really mean?
With hilarious insight, the hyperobservant Jessica Darling struggles through her college years - and the summers in between—while maintaining her usual mix of wit, cynicism, and candor.
(From Quoting the Publisher)
Target readers:
Teens, high school students, young adults.
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Megan McCafferty is the author of the hit novels Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, and the editor of the short story collection Sixteen. A graduate of Columbia University, she lives in New Jersey with her husband and young son. Megan is currently working on her next book in the Jessica Darling series. To find out more go to MeganMcCafferty.com.
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From Publishers Weekly
This funny, sympathetic installment in Jessica Darling's story (Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings) picks up the summer after her freshman year at Columbia University. The precocious Jersey girl, now a savvy city slicker, has picked a major (psychology), landed an internship at a hip Brooklyn magazine and managed to stay together with her high school boyfriend, reformed bad boy Marcus Flutie, for the entire school year. McCafferty follows Jessica through three years of college, chronicling her academic and extracurricular endeavors, her romantic and financial woes, all in Jessica's frank, exuberant voice. While she kisses a Republican, lusts after hot Spanish grad student Bastian and ventures a clumsy hookup with dormmate Kieran, Jessica expends a lot of energy agonizing over her long-distance relationship with Marcus, now a student at an unaccredited Buddhist university in California. The snappy writing, au courant wordplay (e.g., Jessica affectionately dubs indie-rock boys "bright-eyed, death - cab cuties") and easy-to-relate-to plot turns will keep eager teens - and teens-at-heart - turning the pages, but designating a high school romance as the novel's primary engine leaves the story stagnant.
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The First
I keep rereading Marcus's latest haiku, printed out precisely for this purpose. How did he come up with Poetry Spam? Where did he get the idea to turn his junk e-mail into poems? I marvel at his talent for revealing the hidden beauty in ordinary things.
I miss him and I know he misses me, too.
There's nowhere to sit in Port Authority unless you buy something. I got booted from Au Bon Pain because I stupidly disposed of my $4 shot glass of orange juice. The eagle-eyed Garbage Guard informed me that I was no longer allowed to occupy one of the umbrellaed tables. I left, dejected and dehydrated.
I'm now at Timothy's World Coffee, where there are no open indoor umbrellas to bring me bad luck. I'm sitting on a stool, breaking in my new journal, trying to take teeny-tiny sips from my overpriced bottle of Poland Spring water just so I can preserve my right to be here. I'm broke, and there aren't any water fountains for free, germ-ridden refills.
This is bad because I can chug gallons at a time. Accutane sucks every drop of moisture out of my body. I am one large flake of dandruff. The corners of my mouth are split open and bleeding, and I have to spread Carmex beyond my lip line, which makes me look like I've spent the morning sucking on a stick of butter. I hope that by the time I see Marcus my lips won't be so crusty/greasy.
Sahara skin and lips are just two of Accutane's side effects. According to the information booklet, I should be alert for any of the following:
• diarrhea, rectal bleeding
• severe headaches
• nausea, vomiting
• changes in mood
Well, if suffering from diarrhea, rectal bleeding, severe headaches, nausea, and vomiting doesn't swing your mood in some direction, nothing will. Because my mood crests and crashes just fine on its own, I went on Accutane only at my mother's insistence. As a firm supporter of any and all advancements in the cosmetic sciences, she believes that not providing one's child with flawless skin is akin to child abuse. Accutane cured Len Levy, who was covered in pissed-off, purple pustules back in high school, so it should work for me. My acne isn't nearly as allover and angry as his was, but I have to agree with my mother when she points out how my complexion is never completely clear. I always seem to have one knotty cyst somewhere on my face, and when it goes away, another takes its place. One after the other after the other.
My daily dose of Accutane is the standard prescription for a person twice my weight. Three squishy yellow pills. This is my third cycle of the drug--the first two times didn't work--and I feel strangely proud when my doctor says that in twenty-five years of practicing dermatology, he has never seen such resilient zits. I'm a medical freak of nature.
I'd like to think that Marcus would call me unique.
Dr. Rosen also says my condition is stress related. No surprise there. Two weeks ago, I wrote four term papers and filled nine blue books over the course of five exams. In the midst of finals, I impulsively (and stupidly) chopped off my ponytail to get rid of my elastic band scalp-ache. The fix-it-up Supercut was supposed to give me a short geek-chic bob with bangs, kind of like Jordan in Real Genius. But with my hair's trademark flyaway frizziness, I look more like Mitch. The only upside to this coiftastrophe is that in my state of scalp-ache-free concentration, I nailed a 3.85 GPA for the semester, which will make my parents happy, though only temporarily so. While my stellar grades help better my chances of postgraduation financial solvency, they do little to relieve my current money troubles. My parents give me minimal fiscal assistance because, in their own words, I made the choice to go into debt by selecting Columbia over my full scholarship to Piedmont. I still stand by my choice, though less passionately now that I have a much better idea of how long it will take to pay Sallie Mae the $100,000 I'll owe for my BA by the time I graduate. Not to mention the cost of the MA and PhD I'll have to get if I want my undergraduate psychology degree to be worth anything at all. I've only got about half a semester's worth of my grandmother's inheritance left and zero summer moneymaking prospects because no well-paying employer is willing to hire me, train me, then let me leave for the entire month of July for my incredible, albeit totally unpaid internship at True magazine. During my salary-free servitude, I'll be staying in New York with my sister, Bethany (with whom I have nothing but DNA in common); her husband, G-Money (who has earned his nickname through gaining and losing millions on the stock market, yet still having enough spare scratch to buy into a local frozen custard and donut franchise in the hope of taking it national); and my niece, Marin (who is very cute, but has projectile-pooping issues), enduring yet another separation from a boyfriend I haven't seen or touched for six months, one who lives down the hall from a nudist Buddhist (Nuddhist?) named Butterfly who thinks clothing is oppressive and can't understand why people think nakedness always has to be sexual . . .
So. Stress? Naaaaaaaaah.
Sitting in the booth in front of me is a cutesy young couple still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. Or they're lovers recently reunited. They're annoying to everyone who isn't them and haven't stopped pecking each others' faces since they sat down. Back and forth and back and forth across the booth, peck and peck. I prefer juicy tongues to these passionless kisses that are as dry as my needy lips.
I just tried Marcus on my cell. Topher, one of his "cottage-mates," told me he was out "cleansing." He told me this the way other roommates at other schools would say someone is out getting shitfaced. Marcus's world is so foreign to me that I can't help but feel that the person who inhabits it is a stranger. I love when I reach Marcus on the phone and as he says hello, I can hear the music he's listening to in the background. That music is the sound of him without me. How he surrounds himself when I'm not there, which is almost all the time.
And will be for three more years.
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| View all 11 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-13 00:00>
The most important aspect of this novel, and one that you have to be aware of to read this book, is that the Jessica Darling of Charmed Thirds is a different Jessica. It's astonishing how much college can change a person, but that is exactly what has happened here. The Jessica Darling of Pineville, class of 2002, was the cocky, attitude-y,if awkward feeling, salutatorian of her class. And she deliberately chose to attend an Ivy League college in the heart of New York City. Change is inevitable. Thus, in this novel, that confident Jessica is knocked off her "suburbumpkin" high horse onto the streets of Manhattan.
Of course, new Jessica disappointed me at times. Her dissatisfaction with her urban life at Columbia was particularly disheartening. Her friendships and time spent there seemed like such a waste for someone who was so eager to go there at the beginning. However, these are not necessarily faults of the novel. They reflect, far more realistically than the first two books, that not everything goes right. As perpetually pissed off as Jessica was in the first two books, she was in her comfort zone. Now that she's forced herself out of it, her inability to accept her surroundings makes her seem far more human than perfect teenaged cynic. Her formerly breezy cynicism transitions into a far more earnest despair, as it reflects her burgeoning transition from adolescent to adult. Although her lengthy introspection becomes wearisome, it contributes significantly to the greater picture that the novel paints.
However, one problem I did have with the book was that Columbia really failed to come alive for me. I assume this is because the Jessica's narration only spans her summer and winter vacations. While it is understandable how this makes the book more realistic, it also detaches the reader from the reality of the setting. Despite the undeniable reality of Jessica's newfound doubts within herself, the fact that we only see her for a few months throughout her four years at Columbia severely detracts from the book. Four years are crammed into 300+ pages, and in the end, it doesn't feel thorough at all.
Nevertheless, this is a fitting continuation of Jessica Darling's saga. Needless to say, Marcus Flutie is as touching and exasperating a presence as ever, and Jessica's relationship with him is as absorbing as ever. This books leaves the door wide open for a fourth, and I'm still looking eagerly forward to reading that one.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-13 00:00>
While I was nearly dissuaded by some negative reviews claiming Charmed Thirds paled in comparison to Mccafferty's previous two novels, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, I bought it anyway. Moral of my experience: don't buy into negative hype. Charmed Thirds was every bit as good, real and addictive as Mccafferty's earlier masterpieces. Some readers may have been put off by Jessica's coming of age college experiences. However, I had the opposite reaction - I think the evolution of her character for better and worse just strengthened by admiration for Mccafferty as a writer. Had Jessica remained the same as she was in high school, the story would have become stagnate and fairy tale like. We cannot impose idealistic qualities on Jessica and neither should Mccafferty. Let's not pick up Mccafferty's fourth Jessica Darling story expecting to read exactly what we want to happen - let's let Jessica tell us what's going to happen.
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Rachel Cohn (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-13 00:00>
Applause and praise to Megan McCafferty for delivering another excellent Jessica Darling installment. Jessica's college years find her as smart, funny and observant as ever, but with a difference that's unique to "series" characters: she's allowed to grow up. Her uncertainty and insecurity, not knowing exactly what she wants, who she wants - it reads real and true for someone her age (teens and college-age readers will totally relate); still, at heart, Jessica remains the feisty, strong, intelligent heroine we've grown to love. She's the girl who's your alter-ego, your best friend. Cheers to Megan McCafferty for allowing Jessica to grow and evolve but still remain herself, and here's to Jessica continuing to surprise, delight and inspire readers into her (and their) adult years.
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Julie Taylor (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-02-13 00:00>
The minute I finished Second Helpings in Summer 2004, I jumped online to see just when I could continue this look into the life of Jess. I was simultaneously excited (that a third novel was in the works) and disappointed (that the novel was not scheduled to print until Summer 2007). In January, I read that it was scheduled for the April 2006 release, much to my happiness, and pre-ordered the novel and received it this past Friday. I decided to refresh my memory and ended up reading the entire series over this past weekend and finished this third portion of the series (Trilogy? I hope hope hope there's more!) a little less than ten minutes ago. I would advise rereading the first two installments...now, on to the actual review:
I'll be honest with you, Charmed Thirds was not exactly what I expected. I was more or less thrilled at the prospect of delving deep into the Marcus-Jessica relationship and the mushy-gushy nonsense that I so desperately long for in my own life. However, the novel is much more realistic in that the relationship isn't perfect and (gasp!) doesn't last the length of the book. It instead explores other relationships (or lack thereof) Jessica becomes involved in, many involving drunken sexual encounters. Someone mentioned earlier that this is a fault, but I can assure that, being a college student myself, I know that my peers are very much engaged in such activities on a week-endly (if not nightly) basis. It is sad but true, much like the uncensored version of Jessica's foul mouth, which whether you want to believe it or not.
The difference is the sharp-wit which is enhanced by a more mature (but not overly so) outlook than the previous journals. I laughed out loud so often that I had the urge (but resisted) to copy down several quotes throughout the book. It is overall,lighthearted, but holds a good message that most people need to hear: Live!
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