Wuthering High

This book by Cara Lockwood is really weird, but I like weird. The cover looks like pornography - yes, it's a book about a school, so I suppose it's appropriate that there's a girl in the uniform on the front, but still . .. It's one of those teen stories with masses of pop culture references, with that particular teen voice which Meg Cabot favours, and with a lot of humour. The weird part is that the school is staffed by a dead Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway (amongst others), and that a fellow student named Heathcliff has decided to take care of Miranda (the main character), which you'd think would make her top ten list of things she'd hope never to happen in her lifetime.

It's a very odd mix of "don't take drugs/bad boys want to rape you/be honest with your parents" and literary references. It's funny, entertaining enough, clever, but strange. The school's chapel is devoted to Shakespeare; punishment for talking back is being bound and gagged; and on the last page of the book is a community announcement advising readers to go and get AIDS tested. I'm not quite sure how books like this get published, but I'm all for experimental literature, even when it doesn't exactly work.