Bibliography:
Elkeles, S. 2008. Perfect Chemistry. New York: Walker and Company. ISBN: 9780802798237
Plot Summary: Brittany and Alex couldn’t be more different: She’s a rich white girl with designer clothes and a designer life. He’s a Hispanic gang member from the wrong side of town. They have a run in in the parking lot the first day of senior year, and things go downhill from there. When they are assigned to each other as lab partners in Chemistry class, Brittany is devastated to be separated from her long time Ken doll boyfriend and Alex bets his friends he can get her to have sex with him. But both have secrets they are hiding. Brittany’s family is far from perfect, her older sister has cerebral palsy, and her mother expects Brittany to be perfect to make up for it, and her father works all the time, as if avoiding the situation altogether. Alex loves his family and will do what it takes to protect them, even enter the gang lifestyle. He’s smart, he can fix anything, but he knows how his life is going to turn out. In chemistry class and out, they will slowly learn the truth about each other and themselves.
Critical Analysis: There isn’t any teen girl that I can think of that wouldn’t love this story. There is forbidden romance, and true friendship, and Hispanic characters and a real urban gritty feel. Elkeles creates fully realized characters that the reader comes to care about, and creates suspense with the situations the characters find themselves in–quite a nice feat, considering that even though I knew this was a romance, I was still left wondering at several points in the story whether the main characters would end up together in the end. Once again, we have a great female author writing romance for teens and again I feel like these sort of things are sort of brushed aside as not being well written or literary. I argue that writers like Ekleles sometimes even have a harder time of writing so well, since they are bound by genre conventions. I really liked the relationship between the two sisters, and I enjoyed the grittiness that did not overwhelm the rest of the story.
Connections and Readalikes:
- To Romeo and Juliet, a different form of forbidden love
- A librarian compiled book list of other books dealing with forbidden love
