Title: Ready or Not (All-American Girl #2) by Meg Cabot

Pages: 238

Genres: YA, Romance, Contemporary

Published by: HarperCollins (Aug. 1, 2005)

Summary

Top ten things Samantha Madison isn’t ready for:
10. Spending Thanksgiving at Camp David

9. With her boyfriend, the president’s son

8. Who appears to want to take their relationship to the Next Level

7. Which Sam inadvertently and shockingly announces live on MTV

6. While appearing to support the president’s dubious policies on families, morals, and yes, sex

5. Juggling her new after-school job at Potomac Video

4. Even though she already has a job as teen ambassador to the UN (that she doesn’t get paid for)

3. Riding the Metro and getting accosted because she’s “the redheaded girl who saved the president’s life,” in spite of her new, semipermanent Midnight Ebony tresses

2. Experiencing total role reversal with her popular sister Lucy, who for once can’t get the guy she wants

And the number-one thing Sam isn’t ready for?

1. Finding out the hard way that in art class, “life drawing” means “naked people.”

 

What I Thought

I want to start by saying I absolutely love Meg Cabot; she’s one of my favorite authors.  All her books are so funny, and honestly just so much fun to read.  So when I found her All-American Girl series at a library book sale, I was quite excited.  However, while I found the first book to be fun and enjoyable (check out my review for it here!), Ready or Not was definitely lacking.

Basically, the entire book was about Samantha deciding whether or not she was ready to have sex with her boyfriend.  Everything single thing always went back to that.  While there definitely wasn’t anything explicit in this book, it still felt a little much.  One of the things I really liked about the first book was the fact that their relationship was very innocent; it was more about the butterflies-in-the-tummy-do-I-really-like-this-guy feelings as opposed to the physical, whereas this book was the complete opposite.  So that was a little disappointing.

I still enjoyed the characters though – especially Lucy.  I really love it when the popular, older sister isn’t portrayed as a mean girl.  It’s clear that Lucy really loves her little sister and wants what is best for her, and that sister relationship they shared was one of my favorite things about this book.

Even though this book wasn’t the best, there still were a few funny moments in there.  Overall, this book wasn’t completely terrible, but it definitely wasn’t Meg Cabot’s best work.  It felt immature at times, but given the subject matter, I wouldn’t recommend it to younger teens.  Also, Samantha really needs to work on her communication skills!  If you’re looking for a book that talks about sex though, then I would definitely recommend it to you.