Lubner, Susan. The Upside of Ordinary.

Lubner, Susan.  The Upside of Ordinary.  Holiday House  136p      $16.95   978-0-8234-2417-7         2012        elm/ms                VG-BNe Realistic fiction                                   

Jermaine picks up her movie camera and tries to become famous by filming her family in their daily lives.  She wreaks havoc everywhere, causing rifts with everyone around her, including her best friend, her mother, and her cousin.

Susan Lubner is a relatively new author of young-adult fiction.  She has the requisite qualities of being a good story-teller and a chooser of contemporary topics that are sure to appeal to young teen readers.  Her character Jermaine is annoying to all those around her, and she will definitely annoy her readers with her antics, but they will relate to her perseverance and her drive to become famous.  What is just an ordinary life soon becomes quite emotional for everyone who she tries to film.  Her first endeavor is to film her sister while she braids the hair of Jermaine’s best friends, and the disastrous results create enmity right from the start!  Her next victim is her mother.  Jermaine sets up her mother in a most hideous way, by releasing a tarantula into the home and filming her mother’s reaction.  At each moment, Jermaine is either filming, being punished, or trying to come up with her next project, and readers will respect her tenacity.  This book is filled with clean humor about the pains of growing up, and it is real, both in the sense that Jermaine is filming real life and in the sense that raw family emotions are revealed on camera.  The intrigue lies in the disappearance of Jermaine’s uncle, and as the family awaits his return, Jermaine accidentally films him hiding in her barn while she is helping to find a ring that she lost in her mother’s pickle jars.  Jermaine does everything wrong until the end, when she finally realizes that capitalizing on the raw emotions of her family as they resolve conflicts is not the way she wants to become famous. 

The theme of this book is clear, the characters are both annoying and endearing, and the plot is interesting and contemporary.  Note the error on page 40:  furthest should be “farthest” (near the bottom of the page).  Many grammar books point out that “farthest” refers to distance in physical terms.          

Reality television-Fiction                                                                --Martha Squaresky