Alley loves Cole Porter and Neutral Milk Hotel. She doesn't want to get romantically involved with any of the guys in Des Moines, since she's headed to Seattle for college.

But then one night she hears Doug sing two songs ...

Read Sunday (after I found out I'd have to repay shipping if I returned it to Amazon) and it was very disturbing. The fluffy prom scene on the cover and the ditsy title are totally misleading. There were deep philosophical observations about death, culminating in a grueling attempted suicide marathon -- and there were graphic descriptions of rotting flesh and brain-eating. I had a bad dream about it that night.

On the bright side, Selzer mentions Alley's love for classic writers such as Benvenuto Cellini, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, so maybe teens who read this will be inspired to check them out. The quote from Leonard Cohen was a great way to end the book: "There is a crack ... in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Tons of typos, plus mixing up the names of the coffee shops where Toby and Tiffany work and referring mistakenly to "Marie" at times when the action centered on "Michelle" (they may be cardboard characters, but Marie is a friend to the protagonists and Michelle an enemy) confirmed my opinion that editorship is a dying profession.

My favorite scene -- quite scary in a psychological way -- was when the kindly high school newspaper faculty advisor was replaced by a Victorian vampire! I also enjoyed Alley's trolling of a zombie message board for "converts", even though her contempt for females who live online hit uncomfortably close to home at times ;-)

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

I left this in a plastic bag in a bamboo grove on the western side of my back road (leads directly to the high school by way of the Lifesaving Crew). Happy hunting! (and be forewarned of its gruesomeness)