Gingerbread

Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn
Paperback, 176 pages


Published March 8th 2011 by Simon Pulse
(First published March 1st 2011)


My shelves: books-i-own, contemporary, read-in-2012, realistic-fiction, young-adult
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Description via Goodreads

"I will be as wild as I wanna be."After getting tossed from her posh boarding school, wild, willful, and coffee addicted Cyd Charisse returns to San Francisco to live with her parents. But there's no way Cyd can survive in her parents' pristine house. Lucky for Cyd she's got Gingerbread, her childhood rag doll and confidante, and her new surfer boyfriend.
When Cyd's rebelliousness gets out of hand, her parents ship her off to New York City to spend the summer with "Frank real-dad," her biological father. Trading in her parents for New York City grunge and getting to know her bio-dad and step-sibs is what Cyd has been waiting for her whole life. But summer in the city is not what Cyd expects — and she's far from the daughter or sister that anyone could have imagined.

My Review

I didn't really know what I expected of this book and upon finishing it, I'm still not quite certain of how I found it. I can appreciate Cohn's message and the potential of Cyd as a character but I don't think that the execution of these things were handled as well as they could've been. I thought that writing style was one of the biggest issues for me as I found it slowed me down - I wasn't used to the dialect which felt very superficial.


Cyd Charisse is our protagonist and she has traits that both annoy me and that I can admire. I felt as though there was a bit too much effort to make Cyd appear to be an outspoken and outlandish girl, which bothered me. Initially, she comes across as rather obnoxious, whiny and petulant. It is clear that Cyd is a difficult character and only as I read more of the book did I adjust to her personality and become more understanding of her. As I progressed throughout the story, I began to realise that a lot of what Cyd had gone through did contribute to her sometimes harsh thoughts and actions. 


I admire that there was a big message that we shouldn't judge people by our first perceptions, but there was also a lot of other lessons that Cyd could have potentially learned, but I don't feel that she completely realised this. Cohn tries to tackle a lot of subjects in this short novel and I think that she would've been more successful by trying to discuss fewer things, but in more depth. 


I really liked Cyd's friendship that she had with Gingerbread, an old doll that she had since her last meeting with her biological father. It may sound strange for a teenager, but it helped me as a reader to connect more with her and her sentiments. Both Cyd's romantic and familial relationships were intriguing. Though some of the characters felt unnecessary, such as Leila the housemaid, and some were very stereotypical, such as Nancy, her mother. Shrimp, Cyd's boyfriend, seemed like an interesting character and I can see that he could be developed well in the next novel in this trilogy, but the romance between them both became a little obsessive and tedious.


This isn't a book that I'd particularly recommend, but it isn't something that was disastrously bad.I'm not eager to read the next instalment of the Cyd Charisse series and I feel as though I may have liked it slightly more as a younger teen.