Meg Cabot: JINX

Meg Cabot
JINX
Macmillan
254 pages
ISBN: 978-0-330-44201-5

So, I originally figured it might be easier to take a few days until I write the review for a book I finished, but now that I've tried just that (and finished a few more books in the mean time), I'm desperately trying to remember all the facts and what I thought about the book in detail. Not good!

In this YA novel, Meg Cabot takes teenage country girl Jinx to New York City in order to escape a stalker. He parents figured it might be better if she stayed away from her hometown for a while and therefore arranged for Jinx to stay with her aunt and uncle in the Big Apple for the rest of the school year. While she is not exceptionally happy about this, Jinx still agrees, only to see that her bad luck, which got her the name, came with her. Only this time, she's not one of the popular girls, but has to deal with a cousin who is into witchcraft and tried to coerce Jinx into joining her coven. When Jinx refuses to do so, and on top of that starts spending quite some time with the neighbor's son, her cousin gets jealous and all of a sudden, even more trouble appear in Jinx' life.

Meg Cabot once again created a YA novel that will be a fun read for teenagers, but there are some aspects of the whole story that just didn't sit well with me. Besides a really gory and utterly horrible scene (and not only for a YA!) pretty much at the end, there were some scenes that introduced a world no teenager should know about or even made believe to be existing. After her arrival in New York City, Jinx first meets her cousin when she's out in the backyard with some friends actually consuming drugs and no one notices or cares about. Other than that, the characters were for the most part really likeable (gotta have one or two bad people, don't you?) and it was easy to imagine what they'd look like from Cabot's description. The story itself was well constructed and led the heroine through different turmoils that were created for the most part with hilarious side effects for the reader, before she got to accept herself for who she is. All in all I guess I would read a follow up, just to see what happened, but I don't think it would be necessary to write one.

Rating: 3.5/5