YA or STFU

The Carlyles (Gossip Girl, Series 2), by Cecily von Ziegesar

von Ziegesar, Cecily and Annabelle Vestry (2008). The Carlyles. NY: Little, Brown. 243 pages.

After Blair, Serena and company all left for college or whatever and Jenny went off to private school and got her own series (”The It Girl”), New York high society (the fictionalized teen version at least) has been pretty lame. Thank God the Carlyles moved in. The Carlyle triplets (that’s right, there’s three of them), daughters and son of one of Manhattan’s most unconventional debutantes, have returned to their ancestral home from Nantucket, where the young Carlyles grew up. High achieving beauty queen Avery can’t wait to rule their exclusive prep school and win over the popular crowd, while sexy playboy Owen still pines for a girl he lost his virginity to a mere weeks before the family move. Meanwhile, Baby Carlyle is hating New York and is devising a plan to get kicked out of school and sent back to Nantucket and her longtime boyfriend.

Of course, debutante life never runs smoothly, and the Carlyles find that for all their supposed sophistication, wealthy New Yorkers are pretty fucking snobby and hard to get to know. While Baby attracts attention with her disheveled good looks (think Serena van der Woodsen sans shower), smart mouth and attitude, Avery tries to distinguish herself as the next class princess by campaigning to represent the students on her school’s advisory board. Both girls earn the contempt of old money Jack Laurent, this series’ stock bitch-on-wheels. Of course, Jack’s not merely a bitch, she’s also a bitch with a secret, and this first novel in the new Carlyles series assures us that Jack’s secret will serve as lynch pin to a number of plotlines.

What can I say about the new Gossip Girl series that either hasn’t been said already or that you haven’t already guessed? It’s brilliant–as good as the first Gossip Girl novel–bitchy, indulgent fun. While it’s easy to recognize the new cast in terms of the stock characters set up by the first series, I think that there’s enough distinction among the next generation to provide new entertainment. Sure, it’s easy to pin Baby Carlyle as the “new” Serena and Jack as the “new” Blair, and, yes, both characters fit these molds to some degree. More exciting is to consider the origins of these molds (the effortless rich beauty and the painstaking wealthy bitch) and how we accept, reject or even expect them in this kind of fiction.