Truth About Making Out, The - Softcover

In Lantz's fluffy plot, backyard camp-outs and botched makeup experiments are described with assurance and affection. Now that Amanda and Leigh are entering middle school, they have decided that they must put away their childish games and concentrate on becoming sophisticated teenagers. The only problem is that they're not sure how to begin. What's more, despite all the music videos and daytime TV they have seen, neither girl knows for certain what "making out" is all about. In order to learn the meaning of this and other key teenage concepts, the girls start to spy on their older sisters. When their information-gathering sorties end in slapstick disaster, the best friends become victims of their sisters' elaborate revenge. Despite bland characterizations and a rather pat ending, these goofy, briskly written misadventures will certainly entertain an audience of like-minded sixth-grade girls. Ages 9-13.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Leigh and Amanda are sixth graders making the transition to middle school and have all of the unanswered questions most kids have, e.g. how you kiss and why, what it means to wear a guy's jacket, and how you tell if it's the real thing. Spying on their older sisters seems a logical way to get the information, but it proves unpopular with the older girls. The original questions are never answered, although each girl finds a boy who shares her interests and likes her. All of this works on an off-and-on basis. Few of these people seem any more believable than the girls in the "Baby-sitters Club" series (Scholastic). While their curiosity is quite real, some of the events are less convincing. This is light, innocuous entertainment, no worse and not much better than the majority of romance-oriented paperbacks for this age group. --Carol A. Edwards, Buckham Memorial Library, Faribault, MN
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.