Rosie and Skate by Beth Ann Bauman

Love, love, loved this book!!  I saw a review of it on Reading Rants which made me want to read it.  It totally lived up to my expectations.

Rosie and Skate are two sisters who live on the Jersey Shore.  They're locals and work at the shore during the summer while it's full of tourists.  Their dad is an alcoholic - a nice drunk - but still a drunk.  He can't stop drinking.  He doesn't hurt the girls or cause many problems, but he gets out of control one night driving and crashes and lands himself three months in jail.  Rosie and Skate are on their own because their mom is dead.

Their cousin, Angie, comes to live with them and help out, but once their father goes to jail, things are harder between the sisters.  Rosie is hopeful and visits her father and still somehow believes he will get better, while Skate refuses  to go at all.  Skate doesn't attend the support group meetings.  Instead, she spends time at work with her boss Nick, and also pining away after her boyfriend Perry who is gone to college at Rutgers.  She wants to see Perry so badly.  The two of them are great together, but the distance is a problem.

The book alternates between the narration of each sister.  It's cool to hear the story from two points of view.  The writing was real and easy to read.  I liked the characters and the story of each sister.  This was a fun read with some serious stuff mixed in.  I totally loved it!

Here's a link to the New York Times review of Rosie and Skate.

The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp

I've had this book on my shelf forever and finally picked it up.  I loved it!  It took me a little while to get used to the narrator, senior in high school, Sutter Keely, but once I did I was along for the ride with him on his adventures (and a wild ride-it definitely is!)

So, Sutter has a curvy, beautiful girlfriend, Cassidy.  He's a senior.  He is a party-man.  As long as he's got a whiskey and 7 up - he's golden.  Cassidy gets sick of his antics, though, and dumps him.  He's sort of stranded in a weird place.  He's single again, and his best friend Ricky finally got a girlfriend (Sutter made it happen, of course).  Sutter's kind of in a weird place.  He turns to his whiskey and drinks and drinks and ends up asleep in a strange yard.  He wakes to see a girl, Aimee, who says she knows him because she goes to his school.  Aimee is different from any one Sutter has ever hung out with, and he kinda likes her.  They hang out and Sutter sort of takes her under his wing.  But when there's Sutter Keely and whiskey...there's always going to be fun (and trouble, perhaps) ahead...

Like I said, this book was different.  Sutter is such a strong narrator.  I appreciate the voice that Tim Tharp created here.  I loved Sutter's vocabulary words such as, "spanktaculicious" and "fandangulous."  Sutter's a mess but you just can't help but love him.

I was a little weirded out by the amount of alcohol that Sutter drank.  The thing is, he's really the only who who drinks that much in the story.  His friends don't.  Ricky has cut back on partying.  Sutter's got his own little world....So while this book does center around and involve alcohol, I don't think it shows drinking in a positive light at all.  It's honest.  It was interesting because while I read, I was pulling for Sutter, but I also felt like I could understand the other people who told him maybe he shouldn't drink so much anymore.

I really liked this book.  Sutter is a unique character I've never met before, and it was nice to meet him.  He's a fun guy - no one can deny that.