Rating: 5/5

A sweet, toe-curling, heartwarming and one of the cutest YA romance I've ever read, full of killer dimple smiles, dorky sci-fi-addicted boys, and the goth girl with the inner geek goddess just waiting for the right boy to emerge. It utterly deserves a place in my all-time favorites shelf. ( )

dated but great. I liked the characters and the simplicity of the story ( )

Egalley thanks to Cedar Fort

Such a sweet book and completely not stereotypical.

Jen is a seemingly tough Goth girl hopping from foster family to foster family because nobody really knows how to handle her. Her plan this year? Seduce a do-goodie geeky boy Trevor to the dark side. The bet with her BBFs? They will pay for an outrageous piercing for her so she can be thrown out of her present foster family and move on.

Jen starts working her charm on Trevor who is surprised, angry and fascinated by her attention, and not long after she is hanging with his friends, watching Battlestar Galactica, helping him in the local nursing home and *gasp* even going bowling!

What frightens her though is that she is enjoying it. You get a classic story of transformation, where one insecure hardened girl opens up and slowly starts believing in herself and in the possibility of having a happy ending.

Jen is quite honest with herself and abandons the bet earlier on. She likes Trevor, enjoys his attention and the consequences be damned!

I was expecting the usual: he finds out about the bet in the end - meaning: lots of angst, and a dramatic ending.

Eh no. It will happen, but not when you expect it. And it's believable. The couple is sweet, self-deprecating and clever. Once they admit what they want, they work for it. They don't give up, and that's what I found so sweet. The reality and the truthfulness of it all.

Loved the story and I'm happy to say I'm participating in the blog tour starting in the beginning of November, so keep an eye out for a possible guest post and a giveaway :) ( )

Originally posted at Libri Ago.

I originally picked up this book (metaphorically speaking) because of the fun premise: a reversal of roles with the bad girl setting out to corrupt the good boy. I expected a fun read, but what Bennett delivers is so much more than that. It's an honest portrayal of a wounded girl finally making peace with herself and her past.

Jen is a product of the foster system. After a huge disappointment with a family she truly loved, she shuts herself off emotionally. As she bounces around from home to home—some good and others horrible—she becomes the typical rebel teen to protect her heart from future hurt.

The story is fairly predictable, but that's not what makes this book shine. It doesn't need plot twists to pull readers in. It's the startlingly honest portrayal of Jen, her wounds and struggles, that tugs at you. I even cried at one point, which hasn't happened with any book in recent years. It wasn't tragedy that struck me to the point of tears, either, but the emotional honesty that leads Jen to truly find herself.

That said, there is plenty of fun, especially if you're a closet nerd like me. You could think of it as a mild, teenage Big Bang Theory. I whole-heartedly recommend Geek Girl to teens—male and female—as well as adults. The struggle to find oneself is universal, regardless of background or age, and Jen's journey is beautifully told.

Cool fact: Bennett originally self-published Geek Girl before it attracted the attention of a publisher. It proves, in part, that a well-told, self-published story can find success.

Note: The publisher, Cedar Fort, is a smaller independent press in Utah that in the past has focused on Mormon fiction and nonfiction. It looks like they're branching out into mainstream with books like Geek Girl, which doesn't reference religion at all. Plenty of their other books do revolve around Mormon culture, such as The Next Door Boys (review to come). It's not good or bad; just something to note when selecting future reads from this publisher.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a review copy.[b:The Next Door Boys|11706831|The Next Door Boys|Jolene B. Perry|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313699694s/11706831.jpg|16654292] ( )

Changing someone for a joke never works, not in real life nor should it in books. So when a small group of Goth high school girls get together and bet one of their group she can’t change a geek guy into someone cool, I had visions of disaster even though this is billed as a romance.

Raised in a series of foster homes and always feeling like an intruder in the families’ lives, Jen flaunts her Goth look, trying her hardest at her latest home to be as different from their “normal” as possible. At school, she hangs with two other Goth girls, sisters who seem to egg each other on as much as they push Jen to do the outrageous.

Jen feels a pull to Trevor, a Geek who looks and acts completely different from the black dressed, black haired, black make-up wearing Jen and her friends. When the sisters bet Jen that she can’t “turn” Trevor into a bad boy, Jen accepts the challenge.

At first Jen gets off on terrorizing Trevor’s Trekkie friends and his demure, buttoned-up potential girlfriend when she attends their parties. But Trevor isn’t so easily put off, persuading Jen to accompany him to a senior center where he plays piano for the elders and Jen eventually makes friends with some of the residents who say she brightens their days. While Jen makes Trevor’s mother nervous, the mother is reassured when his family bumps into Jen and her foster family at the bowling alley one Friday night, making Trevor’s parents feel more comfortable about his budding relationship with her.

Read the rest of my review at AAR: http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=9398 ( )