How to Be Popular by Meg Cabot
Reviewed by Margo Dill, www.margodill.com, margodll@aol.com
Young adult novel, contemporary
Eleventh-grade girl as main character
Rating: Wonderful voice and loveable characters, whom you can’t stop caring about (even after you’ve read the last page.)
Short, short summary: When your name is used in a phrase such as, “Way to pull a Steph Landry,” and your name is Steph Landry, your school experience is miserable. Thus Steph Landry wants to change her reputation and land the guy of her dreams with the help of a book she found in her friend, Jason’s, grandma’s house titled, How To Be Popular. Steph starts following the guidelines of this old book, and her life actually starts changing–she is recognized by the popular crowd and even dreamy Mark Finley. Sure, her two best friends, Jason and Becca, think she’s turning totally weird, and they start doing their own thing, but isn’t that the price you have to pay for popularity? Steph thinks the world is all right until Mark asks her to do something that would make her family and her two old friends disappointed and angry at her. Will she risk everything to be popular?
So, what do I do with this book?
1. An interesting and lively discussion and journal entries should follow this book to the end. The rules for popularity and an explanation of them are included with the story. Teenagers can discuss these rules and what they think about them. Do these rules help you to become popular or a nice, considerate, well-liked person? What would actually happen if someone started following all these rules? Would this person become “more popular” in today’s high schools? Do students or teenagers have any other rules they can add to the list? If so, have students or your teen write their new rule like Cabot wrote them in her book.
2. Since Meg Cabot is a genius author, this is a great book to study dialogue and characterization. One exercise you can do in this book is read a line of dialogue from one of the characters and ask students to identify who said it. Characters should have their own unique way of speaking, just like people do. How does Cabot accomplish this in her book? Students can also study the character traits of some of the main characters such as Steph, Jason, and Mark. Have students make a list of traits for each character and compare and contrast the lists. These three characters all live in the same town and go to the same high school, but their lists are a lot different. Meg Cabot has developed such well-rounded, believable characters that you feel like you know them by the end of the book. How does she do this? Can your students or your teen write stories with believable and unique characters? Sure, it all starts with the character list and different traits for each character.
3. Believe it or not, astronomy plays a huge role in this book. Steph’s grandfather is building an observatory, where Mark wants Steph to let them have a party. (Besides the how-to-be-popular storyline, there’s also a sub-plot dealing with Steph’s family and the strained relationship between Mom and Grandpa.) Anyway, most teenagers are not that familiar with astronomy. You can have students do research on observatories, what they are for, where the closest one is to your school or home, and maybe find out about some constellations also. I always like when you can take a book and use it to branch into another subject area–which is probably obvious by this blog. Anyway, once students have more of an understanding of astronomy or observatories, they also might have more of an understanding of the decision that Steph has to make in regards to Mark’s request.
If you have used this book with your students or your teenager, please leave a comment here and tell us what you discussed or activities you did.
If you have an idea for a book for me to read and review, please email me at margodll@aol.com or leave a comment here.
