The Rites & Wrongs of Janice Wills

Pearson, Joanna. (2011). The rites & wrongs of Janice Wills. New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. Despite her feelings about the local beauty/talent pageant, Junior Janice Wills decides to enter the contest as part of her anthropological study of adolescents. Janice considers herself unattractive, awkward, and socially inept, and simply doesn't understand the social whirl and pecking order that exists around her. She has friends, but they aren't in the most popular set. In order to understand the behavior of the teens around her--and maybe to find a way to fit in or as a defense mechanism--Janice observes and records her observations about the various groups in her high school, Melva, North Carolina. She creates categories for her classmates such as The Smart Pretty, The Dumb Pretty, The Softball Husky, Hipster Hippie, Formerly Homeschooled, and Beautiful Rich Girl, and describes them in most uncomplimentary ways. I'd have loved to have more development for the members of each of these groups, but she focuses primarily on one group. The book includes Anthropological Observations at the start of each chapter as well as some field notes inside the chapters. Many of those comments are sarcastic and dead-on.

My enjoyment of the book decreased, though, once Janice decides that she will enter the Miss Melva Livermush pageant--a female rite of passage in the town--in order to observe and write about it from an insider's point of view. She doesn't really do so, and seems to actually be giving her best effort to succeed in the pageant. I grew tired of the description of rehearsals of how to walk, putting on makeup and doing the hair, and donning the gowns for the competition, and I wasn't particularly interested in the talent portion of the competition. I longed for the snarkier Janice, and while Janice is probably happier and better adjusted after her pageant experience, things seemed to be wrapped up too neatly for my tastes in the end. Still, any author that can conceive of a term and practice such as"slirting" (basically, flirting with guys who have no chance with you and then acting all surprised when they are attracted, kind of a combination of slumming and flirting) is one to watch in the future.

Favorite Lines:

“I had met Margot the first day of middle school. There, in the lonely, teeming cafeteria, she had smiled and cleared a space for my tray on the lunch table when I, a shipwrecked sailor on the social seas, asked quietly if I could pull up a chair” (p. 9).

“I thought of Ruth Benedict approaching the Pueblo people n New Mexico for the first time. I thought of Margaret Mead and the Dobu in New Guinea. I took a breath and prepared myself: Janice Wills, field anthropologist, about to enter the world of a true Melva High School bash” (p. 93).