I Love You, Beth Cooper

Book: I Love You, Beth Cooper
Author: Larry Doyle
Audience: High School to Adult
In a Nutshell: one nerd's all-night mad-cap journey from valedictorian to happy, bloody pulp

Denis Cooverman is valedictorian, debate team captain, social misfit, and sweatier than he knows what to do with. During his graduation speech at Buffalo Grove High School, he deviates from his original script and instead confesses his enduring love for Beth Cooper, cheerleading captain and homecoming queen. Ever since he first sat behind her in seventh grade- an arrangement often to be repeated due to their sequential last names- he has loved her from behind. And yes, he does say that last phrase at graduation. You can imagine the response.

But the speech is only the beginning of a non-stop night of hijinks and attempts on his life. Beth and the other two girls in her Trinity of Cool, Treece and Cammy, actually show up for reasons unknown at Denis's party, which until that moment consisted only of Denis and his movie-quote-obsessed, ambiguous-yet-insistently-not-gay best friend, Rich Munsch. Then Beth's psycho military boyfriend, Kevin, shows up in a Hummer, and the fun just keeps comin'.

I think humor is one of the toughest things to review, because everyone's sense of it is so different. With that disclaimer in place, I'll say this is the funniest book I've read in a long time. Really, really, funny. I was reading it while waiting for my oil change and trying not to laugh out loud in public, but the funny-ness could not be contained. And that's how I ended up snorting to myself in Tires Plus. Think of the funniest end-of-school teen movie you know and you're getting the idea.

There is an illustration of Denis at the beginning of each chapter, and each one reflects the new injuries and indignities he received in the last chapter. There's a wealth of brilliant new phrases, at least new to me, like "benevolent cliquetator". I present the context for another choice phrase as an example of what I found so funny:

"Henry was the local purveyor of aftermarket pharmaceuticals, not quite a drug dealer though he played the part, replete with an embroidered urban dialect spoken only in the suburbs. What made Henry's lily-white gangsta act all the more sad was that he was African-American. He was a black whigger." (p. 107)

One of the blurb writers describe the book as "wickedly funny," and that about sums it up.