Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl - by Jesse Andrews

Synopsis:  17-year-old Greg and his best friend Earl make movies together.  Usually, their scripts are silly and the "actors" are puppets or Greg's cats.  But, one day, Greg's mom encourages Greg to visit an old friend in the hospital.  Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia.  During their visits, Greg tells Rachel about his movies...even lets her borrow a few.  Somehow, everyone at school finds out about the movies, and a few teachers ask Greg and Earl to make a movie especially for Rachel...



Genre:  realistic fiction

Pages:  295

Level:  intermediate, advanced/mature...some mature language and themes (parents may want to preview this title first)
  
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Opening paragraphs:

So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks.  Do you accept that premise?  Of course you do.  It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks.  In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life:  How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks to bad?

Most of the time middle school sucks even worse, but middle school is so pathetic I can't even bring myself to write about it, so let's focus on high school.

all right.  Allow me to introduce myself:  Greg S. Gaines, seventeen.  During the period described in this book, I was a senior at Benson High School in lovely inner-city Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  And before doing anything else, it is necessary for us to examine Benson and the specific ways in which it sucks.

So, Benson is on the border of Squirrel Hill, an affluent neighborhood, and Homewood, a non-affluent neighborhood, and it draws about equal numbers of students from both.  On television, it's usually the rich kids who assert control at a high school; however, most of Squirrel Hill's genuinely rich kids go to the local private school, Shadyside Academy.  The ones that remain are too few to impose any kind of order.  I mean, occasionally, they try to, and that tends to be more adorable than anything else.  Like when Olivia Ryan freaks out about the puddle of urine that appears in one of the stairwells most days between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m., shrieking at bystanders in an insane, misguided attempt to try to figure out who did it.  You want to say, "Liv!  The perpetrator has probably not returned to the scene of the crime.  Pee Diddy is long gone by now."  But even if you did say that, she probably wouldn't stop freaking out.  And anyway, my point is that the freak-out doesn't have any measurable effect on anything.  It's like when a kitten tries to bite something to death.  The kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, it's a cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on YouTube.