Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles
Review by Elle
Publication Information: Simon & Schuster Children’s / 1 Apr 2010 / 368 pages
Where I heard about it: I read a review over at The Book Smugglers during work hours because I was horribly. terribly. bored. Two days later I had Perfect Chemistry in my hands and mere hours after starting, Rules of Attraction was winging its way to me and I’d pre-ordered Chain Reaction.
Spoilers: No more than you’d get on the Amazon or Goodreads blurbs.
Review:
When Brittany Ellis walks into chemistry class on the first day of senior year, she has no clue that her carefully created “perfect” life is about to unravel before her eyes. Forced to be lab partners with Alex Fuentes, a gang member from the other side of town, Brittany finds herself having to protect everything she’s worked so hard for – her flawless reputation, her relationship with her boyfriend and, most importantly, the secret that her home life is anything but perfect. Alex is a bad boy and he knows it. So when he makes a bet with his friends to lure Brittany into his life, he thinks nothing of it. But the closer Alex and Brittany get to each other the more they realise that sometimes appearances can be deceptive and that you have to look beneath the surface to discover the truth.
On Wesnesday, Kate reviewed Perfect Chemistry and gave it a six-mini Milky Ways out of ten (it’s sentences like that which make me love our ratings system). I am here to disagree with her.
Occasionally I have a complicated relationship with a book. You know, the way you have a complicated relationship with sugar in that you know it’s inherently bad for you but nothing’s exactly stopping you shovelling another half-slab of Dairy Milk Chocolate into your waiting, drool-covered cake-cave? I love Perfect Chemistry like I love sugar: I know that there are so many little things about it which aren’t great for me but the tide of goodness is overwhelming and it’s dragging me under into its deliciously depraved depths with no hope of getting rid of it.
I read Perfect Chemistry in April and it’s taken me this long to write a review for it because it’s taken me this long to dig myself out of being convinced that I had absolutely nothing to say that was worth saying, or anything to say that hadn’t already been said before and said better (read that aloud three times whilst drunk and I’ll buy you a beer myself). I have come to the conclusion that I do ultimately have things to say but that I don’t necessarily think said things are going to be popular.
Books about gang kids are a big instant hit with me. I will read them all, whether written well or rendered poorly, just because they exist. That isn’t a merit of mine. For example, the only other genre I have such absolutely devoted blinkers to is the world of the soulless thriller, the kind where you know who the baddie is by page five but you still keep reading because the satisfaction of knowing that the (usually chauvinistically male) protagonist eventually catches the baddie is worth ten times the pain of the cheese-tastic dialogue. Loving books about gang kids doesn’t make me any better than loving poor reproductions of James Bond. In my defence, however, I also love books about minorities, specifically Hispanic and Latino kids, and these books I am a huge advocate for. In fact, I shout more loudly about those books than any other and I tend to not only dismiss badly written renditions of these particular minorities but also to throw them on the kindling pile with sour (and loudly expressed) words of derision should the very harsh reality of these kids’ lives not be addressed. Which is why this review is so very difficult for me to write.
I came to Perfect Chemistry on the back of a fantastic example of the people impacted by the gang life in a Hispanic and Latino community. In March, I had read What Can’t Wait by Ashley Hope Peréz and then we interviewed her for the blog. It is hard to express how much I love that book. That book proves that such story can be well done. That it is possible to make these story heartfelt as well as brutally honest and bitingly critical of a society which fosters this system. So, admittedly, I came to Perfect Chemistry with a lot of trepidation.
Most of it that trepidation, I swiftly discovered, was wholly unwarranted. If Simone Elkeles is anything, she is brave. In Perfect Chemistry, she made the bold choice to tell a story which had the potential to be controversial at best and ill-received at worst. There are explicit scenes of violence and sexual situations, there is a myriad of cussing in both languages, there is the objectification of women (and men!) and there is the horrifyingly uncomfortable reality of the gang life: there is no easy out and there are no easy answers. Simple solutions are a rare as winning lottery tickets. For this alone, this book is worth reading. And cherishing. And passing on to other people who will read-and-cherish it.
Furthermore, I have a love affair with Alex. I love his spunk, I love his bull-headedness. I love his fear and his front and the moments where he’s nothing but a terrified kid who needs someone to help him out of where he is. I loved his loyalty and his bravery and his horrible choices and his determination to see the course of his actions through to the end. I loved his sexuality and that it was part of him and his culture and that it factored into everything: the way he identified as a man, the way he identified other people, the way he thought about relationships. Finally, I loved the sucker-punch to the gut that was his humbleness and his inferiority and I loved the way that he forced Brittany to deal with these parts of his life.
But see, that’s where the problem lies. Because I have such problems with Brittany. It’s funny because it took me to halfway through book two of the series to realise this. In fact, in the post-book haze, when I told Kate she had to read this, I actually told her (with words from my own mouth) I did like Brittany and that it wasn’t as bad as the first few chapters indicated it might be. But it took me thinking about the book critically to realise that, outside of Alex’s investment in her, I couldn’t for the life of me tell anyone why I liked her.
Sure, she starts out spunky and knowing her mind, but I had the same problem as Kate with her voice. It sounds off and contrived and badly placed; it isn’t a patch on Kiara in the second book. It isn’t a patch on some romance characters from some very trashy pseudo-plot romances I could name, either. It’s just… well, bad. And normally, I couldn’t overlook something like clunky dialogue but the problem is that is mysteriously clears up the minute she’s talking with Alex. She turns into a person when she’s with Alex and I think that’s where the parting of ways happened in the back of my consciousness. I did not love Brittany’s choices and I did not love the tokenism of her disabled sister. I did not love the way she initially treated Alex (or, actually, the way she treated men) and I did not love the way she treated her friends. Brittany, if she were real, would be one of those people that you always prefer to see in company because otherwise she reaches undeniable levels of snotty superiority. A little selflessness is nice – outright showy altruism is, er, less so.
Normally, I’d review a book with such a big flaw (BRITTANY!) and tell people that I wouldn’t recommend it but that’s the strange thing about Perfect Chemistry. I don’t think anything’s lacking in the book, as Kate does. Rather, I just believe that Brittany is not my kind of person, on or off the page. She is, however, other people‘s kind of person (note: in the interests of being fair, Alex is sometimes not everyone’s kind of person) and there is simply too much good in Perfect Chemistry and its sequel (which bests it by x100) to pass up just because it has a slightly naff cover and a whiny girl in it. I could name a hundred other books with similar slightly naff covers and whiny girls (cough) that shouldn’t be set aside because of that one little flaw.
Don’t set Perfect Chemistry aside. Give it a chance.
7 double-stuff oreos: A book that comes with high recommendations.
(For more rating information see here.)
