Fourth Comings

Fourth Comings
Author: Megan McCafferty
Series: Jessica Darling (#4)
Publisher: Crown Publishing
How Received: library

Is the real world ready for Jessica Darling?

At first it seems that she’s living the elusive New York City dream. She’s subletting an apartment with her best friend, Hope, working for a magazine that actually utilizes her psychology degree, and still deeply in love with Marcus Flutie, the charismatic addict-turned-Buddhist who first captivated her at sixteen.

Of course, reality is more complicated than dreamy clichés. She and Hope share bunk beds in the “Cupcake” - the girlie pastel bedroom normally occupied by twelve-year-old twins. Their Brooklyn neighborhood is better suited to “breeders,” and she and Hope split the rent with their promiscuous high school pal, Manda, and her “genderqueer boifriend.” Freelancing for an obscure journal can’t put a dent in Jessica’s student loans, so she’s eking out a living by babysitting her young niece and lamenting that she, unlike most of her friends, can’t postpone adulthood by going back to school.

Yet it’s the ever-changing relationship with Marcus that leaves her most unsettled. At the ripe age of twenty-three, he’s just starting his freshman year at Princeton University. Is she ready to give up her imperfect yet invigorating post-college life just because her on-again/off-again soul mate asks her to...marry him?

Jessica has one week to respond to Marcus’s perplexing marriage proposal. During this time, she gains surprising wisdom from unexpected sources, including a popular talk show shrink, a drag queen named Royalle G. Biv, and yes, even her parents. But the most shocking confession concerns two people she thought had nothing to hide: Hope and Marcus.

Will this knowledge inspire Jessica to give up a world of late-night literary soirees, art openings, and downtown drunken karaoke to move back to New Jersey and be with the one man who’s gripped her heart for years? Jessica ponders this and other life choices with her signature snark and hyper-intense insight, making it the most tumultuous and memorable week of her twenty-something life.

GAH! Megan McCafferty, you infuriate me with you and your endings and your sequels and your... GAR!

Fantastic. Seeing Jessica think is, as usual, amazing, and her observations on the world are ever witty. This one, however, instead of the span of the year was written over the span of a week, and that made it the best one I've read so far. It kept me in suspense, it made me laugh, and it made me scream and bang the book on my lunch table (much to the surprise of my lunch mates) when I finished it and was infuriated by the ending. Megan, hurry up with that next book already!

Overall Rating & Final Comments: 10/10, no matter how infuriating the ending was. (It just shows how much I liked the rest!)
Sloppy Firsts or She's So Money?: She's So Money is a funny read by itself, but, as a series, Jessica Darling ranks She's So Money's main character, Maya, by miles.

Happy (not book banging) reading!

~Nicole