Saturday, December 20, 2008

Review: The Au Pairs by Melissa de la Cruz

Total: Two point five

{My own craptastic summary}

Three girls. Ten thousand dollars. One summer.

Eliza, Mara, and Jacqui - teenage girls who were selected to be 'au pairs' (in a nutshell, summer nannies. Usually accented, hot, and imported from small European countries) for the four wild, privileged, and out-of-control Perry children.

Behind the Grade:

Another 'eh' book. Nothing outstanding, besides Melissa's writing. I love her. Slap her name on anything and I'll buy it - no need to put blurbs, an image, or even a summary. She's great and her blog is pretty much my life.

It's quite flirty and fun. Light. Although some tough issues of class and society are touched upon, there's enough name-dropping to bring everything back down to a superficial level.

There are a couple life lessons included in here and all the beachy fun certainly warmed up my winter night.

The book is a couple years old now so some of the references are dated, just like the Gossip Girl books. I'd recommend picking up Blue Bloods, also by Melissa, instead, or even The Ashleys (also-also by her) for the younger set. Blue Bloods incorporates fantasy elements into the story and the fit between the vampire lore and masked balls is seamless.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, that doesn't sound too hot. I did enjoy the Blue Bloods books though -but not because of the whole Gossip Girl-esque element to it. It's hard to love an author, but feel meh about the book isnt it?

Lenore Appelhans said...

Being an au pair sounds cool, but I bet it's not...

Bookworm said...

Aww, boo hoo. I thought it looked good, but I don't really want to read it now. I really want to read BLUE BLOODS, though, it looks gr8!

Khy said...

I've never read any of Melissa's stuff, though I've been meaning to. I suppose I will not choose this one to rae.d

kayla said...

ok i dont read.. ever. my best friend picked up this book and she told me i HAD to read it! so i took her word for it and this has become our favorite series! we read the series in less than a week and we were sad when we came to the end of the series because we wanted to keep reading them. i love these books!