Jennifer James is your everyday brainy, unpopular girl. When a reality TV show chooses her school as the subject of a new show, Jennifer is surprised to be chosen as a participant. The grand prize is entry into the elite St. Willibald's College, and Jennifer's determined to win. But it's not so easy, especially when there are the complications •a blonde bombshell rival •a combative feminist mother •a distracting love interest and the prospect of a first snog •and, above all, a lack of talents required to win the public's vote! Teen readers will devour this hilarious diary–style exposé about reality TV and one girl's struggle to figure out herself. 12+
Gillian Shields was born and brought up in Yorkshire, in the north of England. As she grew up, she had two passions:books and theater. Gillian’s love of books led her to read English at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. After university she studied acting in London. She then taught in a drama school, the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts, for several years, becoming Vice Principal. She recently taught English and Drama at Beechwood Sacred Heart, a girls’ boarding school.
Having children gave Gillian an excuse to carry on reading children’s books, as well as a motivation to write them. She has a son and a daughter, and is married to Brian, who works for the New York Times Media Group.
Hobbies, Interests, and Enthusiasms I am currently learning Italian (or trying to!) and have a secret fantasy about going to live on the beautiful island of Sicily one day, and having a little stone house with a lemon tree in the garden, and a view of the blue, blue sea! I am lucky, though, because I do live in a fantastic part of England, full of soft green fields and rolling hills and cottages that date back four hundred years.
I like to go for long walks and see the changes that the seasons bring, and I try to imagine how it all must have been years and years ago, and how the people lived. I was brought up in the north of England which is much more rugged and wild—the backdrop to Immortal.
I also enjoy being in the city—although I wouldn't want to live there all the time, it's fun to go window shopping or to big new exhibitions or shows, or just hang out in a coffee shop with a cappuccino and a notebook and watch the busy world go by.
Something I enjoy is painting. I have taken quite a few art classes and find it very creative to work with paint and charcoal and images instead of words, though somehow I can't help adding bits of poetry and scraps of words into my paintings, too… When I was at school, I was completely obsessed by the Pre-Raphaelites, and I love the way their art is so intertwined with poetry and stories. My best friend is an artist and she is incredibly inspiring to me.
I hate cooking but love the idea of being a good cook and welcoming all my friends and family to delicious meals. So I have lots of beautiful cookery books but I never get past the first couple of recipes. Every so often I get madly enthusiastic all over again, but it doesn't last.
When I am writing, I can't listen to music—I find it too distracting, but I love to listen to the radio when I am driving. I listen to pop music in the morning and classical music in the afternoon. That just seems right somehow. My son is really into music, so I enjoy sharing his enthusiasms. At the moment we are listening to Eminem, Akon, NDubz, Chipmunk, Kanye West, plus Greenday, Michael Jackson…the list goes on. My current absolute favorite is Paolo Nutini.
Another interest I have is this amazing charity called The Smile Train which carries out operations for disadvantaged children born with harelip/cleft palate. Sometimes I feel I don't realize how lucky I am, and so it's good to try and do something to help a child on the other side of the world who isn't so lucky. My family also tries to support Sightsavers International, who do simple cataract operations to restore the sight of hundreds of people in the developing world.
On a more self-indulgent note, I love to get to the theater whenever I can, and to the ballet, which I adore. In another fantasy life I would definitely be a ballerina!
I can't imagine getting through a day without reading or writing. I know it sounds a complete cliche, but there it is. I go to a writers' workshop once a week to meet other writers and exchange ideas and read work in progress, and that is hugely important to me. And every spare minute of the time at home I am reading, reading, reading…What would we do without stories? Education St Catharine's College, Cambridge University (MA in Englis
I really like this book so far. It is about a young nerdy girl who goes out for a reality show that is coming to her school. And along the way she makes a few enemies and finds herself falling in love.
This was a cute funny book. As expected, it was unrealistic. It did show that reality TV is often not reality. It was a fun light read. I don't read too many of those, and I found it a fun and enjoyable break from my usual reading.
After years of puzzling over whether or not this book actually existed, I managed to track it down and reread it. I checked out this book out in high school, and aside from remembering the premise and a few random details, not much stuck with me. (Not surprising, given I didn't even remember the title.) As is the norm for revisiting books I read when I was younger, the nostalgia goggles weren't enough to make me enjoy myself too much.
THINGS I LIKED •Gillian Shields is well-verse in reality TV, because the preoccupation of showcasing the contestants' lives is still something prevalent 14 years on. In that regard, this book holds up. •Some of Jennifer's asides were amusing. •Jennifer and Marcus were cute, I suppose. •The very self-aware tabloid headlines were pretty funny. •The book is literally about trashy reality TV, so the antics might be staged, but they're certainly entertaining.
THINGS THAT MADE ME GO "HUH?" •I'm not sure how this premise would work in a modern setting. It seems a little far-fetched to think an entire reality show would take place at a school during school hours, especially when it affects the students' quality of education. •There are 2000s-era mean girls, and then there's Tallulah Perkins. I desperately hope Jennifer was more of an unreliable narrator than she came off, because there's no way Tallulah was that nasty and that promiscuous. •Jennifer's parents' relationship didn't sit right with me. Her mother's Jocasta persona was heavily implied to be something she did only because her husband wasn't paying attention to her. It doesn't help that Jocasta was a "radical feminist", the kind from the 2000s that think anything feminine is evil. Once her parents reconcile, Jennifer's mother drops that ideology and goes back to being a "normal" mother, and I can't bring myself to get on board with her character arc. The "feminism" depicted in this book is definitely a product of the times, but it's a caricature of what real feminism is and doesn't attempt to explain that properly. •Jennifer's crush on Mr. Webster ended abruptly and her feelings for Marcus kind of came out of nowhere. I get she's a teenager, but the 180 she does is kind of hard for me to believe. •Jennifer's preference for academia was seen socially as something bad, but I could never shake the feeling that the narrative was pushing for the "brains over beauty" angle anyway. Jennifer never holds herself to be better or "not like other girls", but she doesn't have to; the story goes ahead and does it for her.
As far as high art goes, this obviously doesn't fall into that category. As a quick read that got a few laughs out of me, it succeeded. I'm glad I finally found it again...but I probably won't be rereading in the near future.
Reviewed by Randstostipher "tallnlankyrn" Nguyen for TeensReadToo.com
What do you get when you take the idea for an in-school reality TV show and cross it with a character reminiscent of Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicolson? One of the freshest and cutest novels around, THE ACTUAL REAL REALITY OF JENNIFER JAMES.
Jennifer James is not the most popular girl in her not-so-posh school, London Road Comprehensive. Boys may not necessarily notice her and her family may not come from money. But the one thing that may be working for Jennifer is when the newest reality TV show, Down the Bog, comes to her school and offers one lucky student a scholarship to St. Willibald's College. This could be the chance for Jennifer to finally go to a good school, and all she needs is to be entered into the competition--but it may not be that easy.
How the show works is that they choose two kids per grade and have a group of celebrities act as teachers at the school. The entire time, cameras will be showing all the action that is happening inside the school, and each week there will be a certain competition that the contestants and celebrities will have to compete in. And each week, viewers will call in and the one student and the one celebrity with the lowest number of votes will have to leave.
Fortunately, Jennifer is oddly enough chosen to be a contestant. But that may be the only good news. There seems to be many struggles that Jennifer is going to have to face, like the very popular and very rude Tallulah, bullying her way through the competition and practically causing Jennifer's life to be miserable. Then there's Marcus, the guy who Jennifer has a crush on but who also seems to be on Tallulah's radar. And then there is Jennifer's feminist mother Jocasta, who hates the idea of Jennifer being on a reality show. For now, trying to win the competition could be the hardest obstacle that Jennifer has ever faced.
THE ACTUAL REAL REALITY OF JENNIFER JAMES is witty, fun, and very compelling. Readers will get so attached to Jennifer that they will desperately root for her all the way, whether she wins or not. Gillian Shields captures the true essence of how it feels to want something very badly and to do the greatest thing to get it. The one thing that was on my mind during the reading was hoping for there to be a sequel to this fantastic book.
The good: Overall, it’s an amusing read if you don’t think too much about it. It makes fun of reality shows and provides an afternoon’s entertainment (or longer, depending how fast you read).
There are some interesting characters. There were only a few times when a name was mentioned and I had to think hard about who that person actually was, despite the large cast.
It did the diary thing pretty well. You still could feel like it was a real story, but there was a lot of narrating rather than just showing what happened just because of the style.
The bad:
Jennifer James is a bit of a Mary Sue. Her only flaw is being bad a gym and being shy and nervous. In my opinion, shyness/nervousness/clumsiness is the first thing writers go to when they realize their female characters have no flaw. The whole time I was a bit annoyed with how generic she was.
Jennifer’s little brother is a prop. Sorry, but I don’t like it when authors add siblings just to give the main character more depth. It’s mentioned once that her little brother is just starting school, then never mentioned again. He’s basically there because she once took him to the park and that helped her interact with a boy.
Jennifer’s parents were having serious martial problems and it’s all solved because Jennifer told her dad to buy her mother flowers. I just wasn’t satisfied by that part of the story. I wanted to know more about her dad, why he was so quiet and more about his job and how the move from Jennifer’s old school affected the family. Her mom went from being INSANE to completely normal from a bouquet of flowers and a concert even though she almost had an affair? It was just all very unrealistic.
I didn’t like the love interest one bit. I just didn’t feel his appeal. I feel like the entire reason that Jennifer chased him was because he had green eyes. That was it. I liked the boy she rejected much more and the way that plot line resolved itself left much to be desired.
The text talk. Oh god, the text talk. Jennifer is supposed to be this really intelligent girl who wants to get into Oxford but she sends txts dat lok lyke dis. No, worse than that, actually. It was painful.
I read it, but I didn't enjoy it enough to recommend it to others. There are better books out there.
It was hard to get my head around the fact that a reality TV show would be allowed to enter a high school, invade the lives of minors, and alter the teaching/learning process by using non-certified teachers in the classrooms. In fact, I never did fully accept the premise. However, our heroine, Jennifer, was interesting enough that I wanted to keep reading her story. Only a couple of other characters came to life -- Marcus, her love interest, Sir Harvey, and Oggy Ogden (a thinly disguised Ozzy Osbourne) -- while the rest seemed to be the usual high school hall/seat fillers that show up in every similar teen book -- beautiful mean girl, her clueless and nearly as mean sidekick, the loyal best friend, the good parent, the embarrassing parent, etc., etc.
The other problem I had with TARRJJ was that it could never quite make up its mind as to whether it was a full-blown parody of reality TV. The premise itself, as mentioned, was ridiculous, and the TV staff and celebrities were, for the most part, dippy. And many of the names were clearly meant to be silly in a Dickensian way: Haydeeze Productions and its owner, Luciano Mephistopholousos; Professor Beer, Lady Itchpole, Jeremy Lurcher, Minister of Education Deidre De'Ath, and the list goes on and on. But on the other hand, Jennifer and her friends were basically depicted as real kids. It made it hard to take Jenny's dilemma seriously at times. This was especially difficult when romance was in the air and love poetry was being quoted. Very jarring.
Overall, though, it was an enjoyable enough book, and it was something different from the usual teen fare, which earns it that extra half-star.
This book was pretty good! I would and did give it four stars! I really liked it because the story was so real and believable. I admire Jennifer's confidence and strength throughout the book, and I really enjoyed the unique personality of all of the characters. It was fun to listen to what happened during the story, and it was interesting to see what the outcome was.
The plot of this book was that Jennifer's school is about to be featured on a reality television show where celebrities, teachers, and students compete for big prizes in front of the entire country, but then Jennifer is one of the 12 student contestants competing for a scholarship to St. Willibald's College, a boarding school with very high standards of its students, and Jennifer could be one of those students. A lot goes on throughout the story with the typical high school drama, love lives, constantly being on camera, and more! With being a contestant on this show, Jennifer goes through a tougher time in her life then it was before all because of the competition. In the end, Jennifer gets highly embarrassed on television and decides to never do this again and she gets to the top two against Tallulah. The theme of this book is to find who you really are and to stick to what is right, not just what the cool people tend to do.
There are no books that I have read that are just like this, which is a good thing because then I get to experience new books. This summer I am going to read more books by this author. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in really interesting, unique books.
***THIS BOOK IS 363 PAGES, AND SINCE THAT IS OVER 350 PAGES, THIS BOOK COUNTS AS 2 BOOKS.***
It was cute. The Brit-speak was a little confusing. I really want to know what "whilst" means, now. But Jenny was down to earth and really connectible. Some of the twists thrown in were a bit confusing. Like the marriage of an unnamed "bosom on legs" and a two-bit singer/actor.