Popular Book Review

“Popularity is more than looks. It’s not clothes, hair, or even possessions. When we let go of these labels, we see how flimsy and relative they actually are. Real popularity is kindness and acceptance. It is about who you are, and how you treat others.”

Book title: Popular

Author: Maya Van Wagenen

Official synopsis (Goodreads):

“Stuck at the bottom of the social ladder at pretty much the lowest level of people at school who aren’t paid to be here,” Maya Van Wagenen decided to begin a unique social experiment: spend the school year following a 1950s popularity guide, written by former teen model Betty Cornell. Can curlers, girdles, Vaseline, and a strand of pearls help Maya on her quest to be popular?

The real-life results are painful, funny, and include a wonderful and unexpected surprise —meeting and befriending Betty Cornell herself. Told with humor and grace, Maya’s journey offers readers of all ages a thoroughly contemporary example of kindness and self-confidence.

Maya Van Wagenen (below) practicing tummy-slimming exercises listed in a 50s guide (above).

My thoughts:

If this book were a movie, it would be a typical motivational feel-good low-budget comedy, complete with tropes and hypocritically uplifting messages. Despite the moral of the tale being beauty is irrelevant to social status, the author records the triumphant climax of her experiment as a Cinderella moment, with her unable to recognize the lovely vision in the mirror while preparing for prom. Maya invites all the school pariahs to said prom to supposedly create an inclusive atmosphere, a move that appears more like a superficial bid for popularity among a group of outcasts than a sincere gesture of friendship.

Self-contradictory aspects aside, the tone of the book is heavily sugarcoated, edited to appear unrealistically sweet and positive. This renders it difficult to believe or relate to as a fellow teenager. Divided into nine sections based on the months in a school year, Maya strives to follow the outdated advice of a 50s popularity guide one section per month. She commences by addressing her “figure problems”, then moving on to hair, skin & makeup, and so on. Facing each new challenge with a degree of gusto disproportionate to the amount of, if any, beneficial results produced, her voice (marketed as “refreshing” and “honest”) fails to connect on a profound level.

Strewn with anecdotes regarding border life, her family members, and school going-ons, Popularis padded with the mundane events characteristic of an eighth-grade girl’s diary, adding a distinctively lackluster finish to the book. Attempts to render the story more moving can be discerned from subordinate narrative threads such as the episode involving the death of a favorite teacher; however, they appeared rather unrelated to the author’s main storyline. Ultimately, several facets of Maya’s memoir made it seem fabricated: the bubbly tone, the strategic photographs, the school’s rigid social hierarchy, the prom ending, and the social outcasts’ outpouring of gratitude all suggest a cheesy high school movie-like concoction.

Verdict: Overall, I do not recommend this book. The author’s social experiment doesn’t seem authentic and her voice is too gung-ho to be genuine.

Reviewed by: Sabrina Hsu'20