We Are SO Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!

Rosenbloom, Fiona. We Are SO Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah!. New York: Hyperion, 2007.
[Book cover credit: www.librarything.com]

Summary:
After a summer away, Stacy and Lydia are determined to rule the school and be part of The Chicas clique. Instead they come back to school to find their third best friend, Kelly, already part of The Chicas and themselves decidedly uncool, so uncool that they weren't invited to the biggest party of the year, Eben's Bar Mitzvah.

Though this is a sequel to You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!, which is focused on the disasterous, friendship-ending events leading up to Stacy's Bat Mitzvah, it is not required reading to understand this book.

Review:
Though this book may fill a niche, which would explain Rosenbloom's 4.5 star rating on Amazon, I found it to be shallow and generally not worth reading. The characters are not well-developed (even after two books worth of them!) and come off as popularity hounds and pathological liars. This is clearly a book for tweeners, given that the plot revolves around Bar/Bat Mitvahs and all of the non-adult characters hover around that age, but I think that it is dumbed down to the point of being insulting to the intelligence of the tween girls it is supposed to attract.

"Ohmygod you guys...Pause. Eben is like the best boyfriend ever. ...He like made his mom drive us to Stamford because the movie he wanted to see was playing only there. She like does whatever he says. Anyway, he bought me a rose. Holler" (p169-170).

We Are SO Crashing Your Bar Mitzvah! has all the trappings of chick lit: fashion, popularity, boys, self-doubt and self-promotion. Unfortunately the, like, totally coolspeak of the girls is so way over the top that the dialog is, like, hard to read, and it is, like, totally clear that the author is trying way too hard to be cool. Holler.