Meg's Diary

THREE MORE DAYS!

July 22, 2006

Three more days until HOW TO BE POPULAR is on sale in the US!

And the first review (from Kirkus) is in!

Armed with a plan, Steph Landry starts junior year determined to shake her place as the butt of her town's saying, “Don't pull a Steph Landry.” The saying, coined by her stereotypically popular classmate, Lauren, is the product of a sixth-grade incident when Steph dropped her Super Big Gulp on Lauren's designer white skirt. Tired of suffering for her spill, Steph puts faith in HOW TO BE POPULAR, a book specializing in reputation resuscitation. Snippets from this sometimes comically outdated text introduce and loosely shape Cabot's chapters, but don't dominate letting Steph's plan play out naturally as she rockets to popularity and tries to figure out how to reconcile her new status with Jason, her childhood best friend. Steph's relationships with male characters, especially Jason and her grandfather, consistently ring true and develop Steph into a refreshingly believable teen. Despite featuring upper classmen, Steph's aboveboard actions and mostly pure thoughts make this a fun and light text suitable for a younger audience wanting to read about older teens.

I had to make the word MOSTLY not in italics because Steph does have some impure thoughts which she follows up with some fairly impure behavior involving a pair of binoculars that we won't get into here because this is a family site (sort of). I'm not sure how the reviewer missed that.

In other news, my computer finally got up and running—just in time for me to go out of town! Sorry to anyone to whom I owe emails—I'm trying to keep up!

Meanwhile, I am headed off to the Romance Writers of America convention in Atlanta this week (come see me at the events listed at the bottom of this page) and then next week, I'm off to New York for a guest appearance on…drum roll: The Today Show!

Yes, I will be talking about HOW TO BE POPULAR on the Today Show on August 4 (barring getting bumped for the war, which is entirely possible).

Then, as if that is not enough, an article I wrote called (what else?) HOW TO BE POPULAR will be featured in the August 6 PARADE MAGAZINE (you know, the free magazine in your Sunday paper. Well, maybe not YOUR Sunday paper, but a lot of them). It's not really about HOW TO BE POPULAR—it's about how to deal with peer pressure and make friends in the new school year.

In other news, I really did think I had the weirdest cats of anyone I know, until I encountered my friend's cat, Howard, whose fur gets so long and matted that it has to be clipped for the summer. Check it out:

Seriously.