Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson

I often end up listening to an audiobook because my previous audiobook is over, this new audiobook is checked in, and I haven’t yet gotten around to reading the “actual” book, even though I have wanted to.  Sometimes, though, I end up with an audiobook because I have been told that the reader did such an amazing job that it would be silly to read the book for myself.  This is a case of the latter.  Laurie Halse Anderson always does a great job capturing an authentic teen voice in her novels, and that “voice” was really amplified by the reader — Katherine Kellgren.  I knew, right from the start, that Ashley Hannigan was going to be an awesome character…  Especially when she said,

“Normal kids (like me) thought high school was cool for the first three days of ninth grade. Then it became a big yawn, the kind of yawn that showed the fillings in your teeth and the white stuff on your tongue you didn’t scrape off with your toothbrush. Sometimes I wondered why I bothered. Normal kids (me again), we weren’t going to college, no matter what anybody said. I was getting by.”

Despite the fact that Ashley proclaims herself as “normal,” there is one major thing that many people would consider extremely abnormal…  Ashley could care less about her senior prom.  Even though it seems to be the only thing many of her classmates have to look forward to, she really thinks the prom is a waste of time and money.  Everything changes, though, when the faculty advisor steals all of the prom money.  Ashley’s best friend and next-door neighbor, Natalia, is the head of the prom committee, so Ashley ends up getting rope-a-doped into trying to save the prom with next to no money.  Often hilarious (especially because of Ashley’s crazy family), this book will appeal to everyone from “normal kids” who don’t care about prom to prom-lovers on the fast track to the Ivy League.

Happy Reading!