I picked up Jenny Green’s KILLER Junior Year in a Housing Works outdoor book fair yesterday (all books were $1!!!). I was looking for a little guilty pleasure literature, and I especially love YA books, so this seemed like a good fit.
Unfortunately, this pointless book with its vapid protagonist was a disappointment. It’s a clever setup (honestly, what teenage girl DOESN’T want to kill her ex?), and Jenny could have been Generation Y’s answer to Dexter – a homicidal young woman with a bloodlust and a code. Instead the authors really squandered the opportunity for smart, black-humored social commentary. Points were almost made, characters were almost fleshed out, but in the end, the book fell short of saying anything whatsoever.
SPOILER WARNING
In Jenny Green’s KILLER Junior Year, Jenny is a soon-to-be junior whose Long Island high school experience has gone sour, and she’s looking for change. She decides to enroll in a boarding school in Canada in pursuit of Josh Beck, the gorgeous guy who got away. At this boarding school, Jenny is the only outrageously stereotyped JAP (Jewish American Princess – neurotic and materialistic), while everyone else is outrageously stereotyped as hippie potheads or obnoxious perverts – and they’re all Canadian!
Jenny successfully hooks up with Josh, and worried she might die a virgin, she sleeps with him, has an unsatisfactory sexual experience, and then breaks it off. Shortly thereafter, a drunken Josh storms into her dorm room and attempts to rape her, but Jenny fights back, and Josh winds up dead. Instead of calling the police, she decides to cart the body away in the middle of the night, dragging it several blocks and up several flights of stairs, to stage the death as a suicide.
It’s clear that Jenny doesn’t know what drove her to take Josh’s arguably deserved death a few steps too far, and even as manslaughter turns into first-degree murder, she never seems to figure it out. Is it fun? Empowering? Is there a Dark Passenger that takes control – her so-called “Supergirl”? It’s a little bit of all of the above … and none of the above.
I was committed to making it at least as far into the book as the murders, hoping that the “blah blah blah I love clothes … blah blah blah my roommates have hairy armpits” nonsense would take a backseat to actual story, but once the murders start, the plot hits a rut on cruise-control and goes nowhere. Because the setting is Canada, almost all of the secondary, one-dimensional characters are Canadian, and they are all unlikeable. The men in the story are especially bad. There’s …
- Josh, the suicidal attempted rapist
- Jim, the incompetent cop who tries to date – then stalks – Jenny
- Dizzy D, the rapper/drug-dealer who dates jailbait Jenny and records video of their sexual encounters (without her permission)
- Buddy, the also-attempted rapist who slips roofies into drinks at parties
- Thomas, the homicidal student planning the mass-murder of his classmates
- Professor Stone, the eccentric and pervy teacher who makes a move on under-aged Jenny
In Jenny’s mind, all of the above males are worthy of her murderous vengeance, and she kills several of them and gets away with it – thanks to the incompetency of the Canadian police force. She’s not particularly nice to anyone she doesn’t kill, from her roommates to the nerdy boy she cheats off of in AP Calculus to the love of her life, who, in a really desperate plot twist, turns out to be an ass, just like all guys in Canada, I suppose. In retaliation, Jenny frames his ex-girlfriend for murder. What a sweetheart.
As far as fictional serial killers go, Dexter manages to be likable because the inhuman things he does is weighed against his ethical code and his affectionate treatment of his friends and family. Jenny, on the other hand, never gets caught, never learns her lesson, and never treats the people in her life well enough to earn any bonus points to tip the scales on the side of “good”. With more clever writing and fewer one-dimensional stock characters, Jenny Green might have been a pleasurable escapist read. Instead it’s just … blah.
