Mike’s Reviews > Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek > Status Update

I'm becoming convinced that Wagenen is a literal Disney Channel character. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's actually really cool that she's brave enough to do all this. But man, the second-hand embarrassment is high in this book.

Wagenen is a weird person. I feel like if I knew her in middle school, I'd pretend to be annoyed by her, and I'd secretly really like her. She's certainly brave. And having read further, her problem isn't so much that she isn't very self-aware, it's more that she's not very aware of other people. Like, she tends to see others in very one-note ways. But I probably did that in eighth grade too.

The book seems to be moving much more in the direction of 'wacky adventures of using outdated advice', which is an improvement on being directionless and confused, I guess. I'm still not totally feeling this, although I wouldn't call it bad at all.

I like this book a lot better when I see it as a slice-of-life account of Wagenen's eighth grade year, rather than something that's going to be insightful about popularity and beauty culture. Which is kind of a problem - Wagenen deals heavily with both topics, yet she has shockingly little to say about them. I might have liked this better if it didn't focus on her experiment, honestly.

I was thinking this would either be the story of how Maya wears ridiculous styles from decades ago, or the story of how she realizes that all of that advice was nonsense, and that beauty culture is toxic. This seems to be neither - I'm honestly not sure what we're supposed to be taking from this. Certainly, Maya doesn't seem to be learning or growing very much, so far.

I'm appreciating how little Wgenen's perspective matches the one that I'd normally get for this kind of story (i.e. one very similar to my own). This doesn't immediately ring true to me, because Wagenen's school and life are so different from mine. It's refreshing.

This is not exactly high on self-awareness. But then again, I wasn't very self-aware when I was in eighth grade either. For something written by a thirteen year-old, I think I can forgive this level of writing - certainly, it's surprisingly polished and not nearly as cringe-worthy as I expected. Especially since the topic is so interesting, I think I could enjoy this.