A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl

Point Beach High is an American High School, near to the ocean with kids whose families all seem to have hot tubs and boats: one popular, athletic, golden boy, three pretty girls, three broken hearts.

Each of the three girls tells her own story about ‘the boy’. Josie is the freshman, pretty, confident and clever. She is excited and aroused by the boy’s confidence and his lovemaking, but when she decides to remain a virgin, she is dumped and labelled frigid. Nicolette, on the other hand, is a girl with a past. She too finds the boy ‘finger lickin’ good’, but when she says yes, she’s labelled a whore. Aviva is the guitar playing child of hippies. She decides to do it when her parents are out with Joni Mitchell in the background, but then is shocked by the speed in which he performs the act and leaves. She tells him she loves him, but he never calls.

All these events are set against Judy Blume’s groundbreaking 1970s’ novel, Forever. In Blume’s story, the protagonist eventually has sex with her boyfriend but the experience is disappointing – she feels let down and eventually realises it’s not her fault. In this version, the three girls and an alarming number of others before them, get their own back by writing bad things about the golden boy in the school library copy of Forever.

Set out like a prose poem which means there are few words on the page, this is a quick read, Stone has tackled a story of great interest to many teenage readers with energy, style and a lot of sexual desire. Essentially, it’s about how male and female teenagers feel differently about relationships: how boys merely want the act and girls want love. It’s the same old story really, with a very misleading title since it’s hard to see how the heart-throb in this story, or indeed any ‘bad boy’ is actually ‘good for a girl’. Haven’t things changed at all in the last three decades?