How To Keep a Boy from Kissing You

Gr 9 Up—Australian debut author Eglington brings Shakespeare to high school, creating a comedy of errors with mixed results. Narrator Aurora Skye is drop-dead gorgeous, popular, and so adept at outmaneuvering her dates that she's never been kissed. Living up to her fairy-tale name, she is waiting for her perfect mate, who must meet a set of rigorous criteria in order to win her heart. As she deals with her constant disappointment with the eligible bachelors at her high school, 16-year-old Aurora busies herself with the love lives of her best friends, the sweet Cassie and haughty glamour girl Jelena. The girls become involved in the school's staging of Much Ado About Nothing. Aurora's ample mental energy is also spent on battling her gorgeous next-door neighbor, whose charms are lost on the narrator as she deals with her distracted father ("New Age Dad") and copes with the reemergence of her runaway mother. While the book strives for the kind of Shakespeare update that was executed to such fresh comedic effect in the films Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, it never quite gets off the ground. Aurora has a biting wit and a difficult family life, but most of the other characters seem one-dimensional, the setting is a generic anyworld, and the plot twists feel contrived.