FWIW, the Abby bits were my favorite part. I LMAO, so to speak.
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"If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut

I second Jenny O's comment, Abby is a great character.

I'm glad her stuff is working for you guys. The point, I think, is that I'm laughing at teenagers, not with them

Maybe thats what is at issue here...the teens are reading it : "Hahaha!...Waitaminnit..."
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"Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a
delusional minority and by the mainstream media which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end."

Fuckin' teenagers think they know everything. Even how they themselves talk.

It worked for me Chris, but then, I'm not a total authenticity maven, and I did realize that the name Christopher Moore on the front of the book and the picture of the author inside meant it was written by a mature male, not a teenage girl and I have to give you props for the teen speak.
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"It's like Mr. Scrappy you bite Coco. Coco, you bite him back. Soon you are both having worms, eating your own poopech..." -Zohan in You Don't Mess With the Zohan

I had never heard w00t before, so I didn't know what it meant the first time I read it- figured it was either teen or geek speak. Even when I was a teenager, I (most fortunately) didn't speak or act like like the average teen...(OK, there was that ill-advised perm, but still)

But since Abby is willing to pepper her speech with French & hip-hop references when they most appropriately convey the feelings she wishes to express, it would not be out of character for her to go retro as well.

Id hit that.

Lilly too

abby's voice was HUGE in this story! she had alot of screen time, if you will.
cracked me the fuck up to boot. sorry that it offended the revolver reading, hot topic shopping set.

that being said....
c'mon now, chris. bikers not only do not know how to create anything other than fabricated parts they certainly don't know how to use electricity to create art! sheeeesh. like, ya know, cmon. bleah. i'm just sayin...


ok, i got nuthin.
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~ TCB ~

I've finished the book now and by the time I got about halfway through the complaints kinda faded away. Only a few instances overall were jarring to me--for the most part Abby's narration is very good. And it was definately funny--a few things were so spot on I could have sworn Abby was someone I knew, like describing an attractive guy as final fantasy-like. Just one of many AG moments when, upon reading it, I immediately looked around for someone to read it out loud to. Unfortunately, I was in math class at the time, so no such opportunity presented itself. *sigh*
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Re: a brief criticism....

KatarinaNavane wrote:

Of course, everything else about YS (so far) is very shiny indeed. (I'm trying to get "shiny" to catch on as slang for good/cool/awesome...ok, maybe I'm not the best example of teenage speech patterns.)

"Shiny" is making *huge* inroads up here.

I've enjoyed Abby's speech patterns, usually finding them funny rather than jarring. It's close enough to what comes drifting over the walls when I have lunch on campus that it works for me.

You guys are all missing the biggest problem with Abby's speech. The simple fact is that the word "like" is used among teens and some adults as a gap filler and therefore is used as not much more than a small pause to give the brain time to come up with the next word. Hence all the "like's" that Abby uses should be surrounded in comma's and they are not! OMG, like, that ruined the whole book for me. You Suck is missing about a two hundred commas and I refuse to ever read it again until this issue is resolved. IT totally ruined the whole experience for me. Here we a potentially great book ruined by the under use of comma's.
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I honestly never thought I would live this long. Now I don't know what to do with myself.

jaandlu wrote:

...Here we a potentially great book ruined by the under use of comma's.

I'm sorry J - were you trying to say something? Cause I, like, totally didn't get it
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"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank

y wrote:

jaandlu wrote: ...Here we a potentially great book ruined by the under use of comma's. I'm sorry J - were you trying to say something? Cause I, like, totally didn't get it

I was, like, trying to say that people can, like, complain about just about anything if they, like, want to.
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I honestly never thought I would live this long. Now I don't know what to do with myself.

As a teenage girl myself I thought Abby's parts were the funniest. I don't personally talk like that but I hear people that do (only less fantasy-loving, which my deepest sadness).
Has anyone ever read the uber-teenage Princess Diaries? Sounded like AG wrote that with a Goth twist.
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You look like a drunk nympho passing out in a alley.

I think that J has just solved the biggest riddle of the 20th century!
The typewriter that was used to write all of Captain Kirk's dialog had the comma key stuck to the space bar!
That's, why, Bill, Shatner, always, said, his, lines, with, pauses, between, every, word.
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Avoid being normal -- John Lennon