Play Me, by Laura Ruby
Ruby, Laura (2008). Play Me. NY: HarperTeen (Harper Collins). 320 pages.
Seventeen-year-old Eddy is known as something of a player, but he's too wrapped up in filmmaking with his guy pals to consider the consequences of his actions. See, Eddy and his two friends have entered a contest sponsored by MTV and, by making it past the first cut, now have to submit new installments of their dramatic series "Riot Grrl 16" to the channel's site every week to be voted upon by the viewing public. A semi-satire of the "Lonely Girl 15" phenom, "Riot Grrl" is pretty popular among voters until some anonymous commenter who seems to know Eddy starts flaming the voting boards with bitchy accusations and starts lowering the series' vote count with his/her lowball judgments. Meanwhile, Eddy is certain that "Riot Grrl" is the thing, even though the series "star" is an unpredictable former hookup of Eddy's who's still a little pissed about the diss she suffered at his hands. Eddy's moved on, however, and is cruising a hot tennis player who seems to like him back. Could this be the girl who turns him around?
While the description makes the novel sound like just another Alloy-esque dramatic romance, I assure you, Ruby's second book is richer than that. I didn't even mention Eddy's kind of fucked up family situation (his mom left them when he was young and acts on a CSI type show) and his hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star dreams of entering the film business right after high school. Then there's the meeting with MTV, which the adult in me recognizes as an homage to Tom Petty's "Into the Great Wide Open." Rebel without a clue, indeed.
Ruby writes Eddy, who also narrates the novel, with a compelling voice completely ignorant of what we, as readers, recognize as inevitable bravado. And that's what makes the book so hard to put down. Eddy's dreams are ones we want to believe in; but, as cynical realists, we recognize the fall that poetic justice demands.
My one complaint has to do more with the marketing and paratext of the novel than the writing, itself. The back matter reads like the book is going to be about a "playa" who gets "played" and, to a small degree, the novel engages with this concept. There's a lot more here than that--this book is no Played by Dana Davidson--and I feel like the promo material is selling the novel a bit short.
On other thing (and this is kind of a complaint, too): we never find out who the online flamer is! As in Ruby's first novel, Good Girls, which deflated a bit when the mystery that motivated the main action was revealed (I don't want to spoil the story, so I won't say much more), I wanted more of a conclusion to the very small mystery element that appeared in this book as well. That said, I'm a real mystery fan, and my reading of YA lit (and the world, if you can believe Jerome Bruner) is colored by that interpretive lens.