I'm going to begin a regular feature here. Every day that I work at the library (or so I hope), I will check the to-be-shelved YA cart and post about one of the many ridiculous books we have. More than half of the YA books come from donations (because libraries are never properly funded coughcough). This means that we have some very wierd and very outdated items.
There were three gems on the cart today, but only one made me laugh out loud.
This inaugural tome in the Heart Beats series features cover art of two negligably teenaged dancers standing in awkward poses with their eyes shut, as though their firey love is too painful to bear. The cover also answers an age old query.
Q: What do you get when you mix ballet and salsa?
A: Hot romance.
The decription on the back is offset by two oval closeups of the cover's depiction of Sophy and Carlos. Their closed eyes and the excess of rouge on both parties suggest corpses post-morgue brush up. Fortunately, the text assures us that not only do Sophy and Carlos both love to dance, they "live for it", so their mortality is assured.
However, their love is not. There's simply no telling whether "the passion between them is just about dance" or "something more".
Unfortunately, I could get fired for reading at the desk, so though it would take me all of 15 minutes to polish off this 233 page beauty, I was forced to skim. I was annoyed to find that the last page featured an almost identical sentence to the back cover: "What she still his partner? Or just a friend? Or something else?" Thanks to the library's spotty ability to purchase, we don't carry any other books in the series. We'll never know the fate of the unimaginatively named dance students.
What we do know is that Carlos likes to wear a vest without a shirt, which I personally find to be one of the most godawful fashion choices a person can make. The shirtlessness allows teen readers to glimpse the strikingly mature trail of hair leading up from his belted jeans. As
the_hawk and Conan O'Brien circa 1998 are fond of shouting, INNAPROPRIATE.