Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad by Naomi Rabinowitz 

Published: Naomi Rabinowitz, 8th October 2012

Length: 278 pages (Kindle edition)

Where Did I Get It?: Purchased on Amazon for 77p

Summary (from Goodreads):

Shy, overweight Melinda Rhodes’ sophomore year of high school isn’t going so well. Her own mother mocks her weight. Her pants split in the middle of school, earning her the nickname, “Moolinda.” She then loses first chair flute in band to Kathy Meadows, her pretty and popular nemesis.

Her luck changes when she catches the eye of Josh Kowalski, a rebellious trumpet prodigy and class clown. Josh has also been hurt by Kathy and asks Melinda to help take Kathy down. Mel figures that she has nothing to lose … and Josh is adorable with gorgeous blue eyes and a winning smile. She agrees to team up with him and looks forward to finally getting back at her rival.

At first, the pair’s pranks are silly, and as they work together, Mel comes out of her shell. Even better, she finds herself falling for Josh and it appears as if he might feel the same way about her.

However, their schemes become more and more dangerous and Mel is surprised to discover her dark side. Just how far will she go to get what she wants — and is Josh really worth the risk?

Opening Line:

A light September breeze swept through Sequoia High, filling the quiet hallways with the scent of cut grass and falling leaves.

~

My Review:

I’m not going to lie, I purchased this book purely on the artistic merit of the cover. I LOVE it and had high hopes for the story itself. I should have listened to the old ‘don’t judge’ chestnut in this case though.

I didn’t come away from Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad feeling inspired or overwhelmed and I’m fairly sure that in three weeks time the only thing I’m going to remember about it is the pretty cover. In fact, I felt like I had read it (and seen it) all before because it contained every element required for a YA High School Romance novel/Teen Romance Movie and not a lot else.

There was the insecure female lead, Melinda, who had issues with her weight and self-confidence, the bouncy popular best friend, Lana, the drop-dead gorgeous but slightly bad love interest, Josh, and the beautiful arch-enemy, Kathy.  She fancies him, they have a mutual enemy, they team up to get revenge, it turns into something more, there’s a teenage drama, they break up, they make up. The End.

For a beach read or an easy read, it is perfect, and if I were fifteen it would probably have been even better because I wouldn’t have read it 400 times before and I’d have still been in that High School world myself which would have made it a thing of daydreams.

There were a few issues though. First, there were the chapter headings – all was going well until chapter ten and then they went all pear-shaped. There were two chapter tens and then the titles suddenly stopped being numbers for a couple of chapters and turned into Roman numerals – this didn’t remove from the reading experience particularly, but seemed very unprofessional, even for a self-published eBook.

Then there were the typos. All the typos. There were speech marks missing all over the place (she’d open them and not close them again, or not open them but close them – that kind of thing), frequent cases of ‘I’ instead of ‘if’ or ‘it’ and the odd ‘urn’ instead of ‘um’. One or two could be forgiven but they were all over the place and all the way through –  it was like it had never been proof read by anything other than Word. I know it’s expensive to get someone professional to look through your work, but most people can find five friends or randoms on-line to read it through and spot things that you miss on all your own read-throughs.

The writing was mostly good, typos aside, although there were a few examples of things that made it read like something written by a fifteen year old instead of something about a fifteen year old. Such as when the characters were drinking – instead of implying that their speech was slurred and they were stuttering and so on, it was all written out phonetically throughout the entire scene. This made it a bit hard to read and pulled you out of the scene a bit because it was, quite frankly, irritating.

Overall, Revenge Of A Band Geek Gone Bad wasn’t a bad book, it was a stereotypically charming YA novel about coming of age and finding your first High School love. There wasn’t much wrong with it but nor was there anything particularly new and exciting about it. I enjoyed it but would have been disappointed if I had spent more than 77p on it.

My rating: 3/5*