Review: Tommy Sullivan is a Freak by Meg Cabot

Tommy Sullivan is a Freak, Meg Cabot

Release date: 2007

Publisher: Macmillan
Genre: Young Adult, Romance
Pages: 249

Why everyone LOVES Katie Ellison
She's top of the class, she parties with A-list, she's bursting with talent- and she's got the kind of boyfriend any girl would kill to get their hands on.

Why everyone HATES Tommy Sullivan
Four years ago he exposed the football team as cheats- and had to leave town, along with his family. But the graffiti branding him a freak still scars the gymnasium wall and no one has EVER forgotten.

Now Tommy's back in town
But he's very far from being a freak. In fact, Tom's hot- TOTALLY hot. And if Katie's not very careful he could ruin everything!

I think this book goes under the name of Pants on Fire in the US, but in the UK (and automatically Australia and NZ) it's called Tommy Sullivan is a Freak. So it's about a girl called Katie Ellison who is about to be a senior in high school. It's the summer holidays now, and she;s working heaps of shifts at her work, has an awesome boyfriend and is popular. Her life is pretty much perfect. But she's a compulsive liar. She lies about everything... including about cheating on her boyfriend. Or that she hates the quahog's that her town is well known for. (You can't tell people you hate quahogs-- it's just not done.)

So then Katie finds out that her old friend Tommy Sullivan is back in town after four years. We all know that something really bad happened four years ago-- bad enough for Tommy to leave town. So when he's back in town, Katie is scared and nervous. Oh, and she's also really into him, because Tommy Sullivan has gotten hot.

Okay, let me tell you that I find books with a 'secret that we only find out at the very end' theme kind of annoying. I hate the suspension and curiosity. Just... no. So I was a bit peeved off right from the beginning. This is why I don't like mysteries! So that was one of the things that annoyed me a bit. Another was the voice Meg writes in: it's basically the same one for all of her heroines, so while I could be reading about Katie, I'm reminded of, say, Mia from The Princess Diaries or Suze from The Mediator series. While the heroines don't have the same traits, the voices are all remarkably the same.

As always, Meg Cabot keeps me pulled in with her humorous writing and situations. I love Meg Cabot because her writing and books have this amazing quality of grabbing my attention and keeping it till the very last word on the page. This book was no different. It's hilarious how Katie can't keep track of her lies, but manages to fool everyone, and the relatively fast pacing of the book keeps my attention from wandering.

My verdict: This book is funny and interesting, as Meg's books always are. While it's a romance, there isn't really much romance until the very end, and the sexiness of it is very limited-- which is usual for Cabot's YA books in most cases.