Every Boy’s Got One – Meg Cabot

Although Holly and Mark have been together for two years, their parents are worried about their differences (she’s Catholic, he’s Jewish, neither are practicing). To avoid drama, they’re running off to Rome to elope, accompanied only by their best friends, comic artist Jane and world issues journalist/author Cal. Cal and Jane haven’t met before, as Cal’s been overseas researching his newly released book on the Saudi oil crisis, but Holly and Mark think they’re pretty compatible – maybe another romance will bloom under the Italian summer skies.
Or maybe not. Even before they officially meet, Cal and Jane cross paths and swords – she thinks he’s sarcastic and work-obsessed, he thinks her bulk purchase of water for the seven-hour flight’s ridiculous. Jane’s more interested in pop culture than Culture, has never been out of the US before and is a romantic, waiting for the right man (who’s definitely not her skiing boyfriend); Cal’s serious and uninterested in trivialities, divorced and embittered, with a girl in every city.
Which, as we all know, means the blooming of romance by the end of the novel. The story is told by e-mail, journaling, texts (or ‘e-ing’ via BlackBerry) and papers (restaurant receipts, Italian official papers, menus), and allows a clear picture of the central characters to develop. Cabot also conveys a nice sense of place – the atmosphere of Rome, the overwhelming nature of the first time of being in a country where nothing’s in a language you understand, and event he way people think is different.
Though a little envious of the short flight (it takes a lot longer to get to Rome from Melbourne), there were many things about Every Boy’s Got One that I… objected to is a little strong, but certainly didn’t like, chief of which was the character of Jane – supposedly in her thirties, Jane’s travel diary (which is supposed to be her gift to the couple but fills with Jane’s own thoughts) reads like that of a teenager:

(Oh no. How can I give this diary to Holly and Mark if it’s full of musings about some random guy’s underwear???? NOW what am I going to give them? I can’t give them candlesticks or something. This is HOLLY.
It has to be SPECIAL. Okay, well, one mention of underwear. You guys don’t mind, do you? I mean, it’s just underwear.)

Did I mention that she's over thirty? I know that this was at least in part deliberate, to heighten the contrast between her America-centric travel naïveté and Cal’s global sophistication, but she sometimes reads as the most pronounced of American tourist cliché – on at least two occasions she unfavourably compares Italian tradition (like shutting down in the middle of the day) to the US, adding “that really, it isn’t any wonder that America is a superpower and Italy isn’t, given that we only take half-hour lunches, for the most part.” I found this aspect of Jane – her superficial, insular provinciality – getting in the way of caring about her as a character.
I also didn’t buy the great romance – attraction, perhaps, but by the end of the book Jane and Cal still seem to have little middle ground over which to bond. I can certainly see them hooking up, dating for a while, even co-habiting, but most romance novels are about Great Love and I can’t see Cal and Jane together in a year, which may be realistic but isn’t Romantic.
Finally, Jane’s journal entries are illustrated with Wondercat sketches, exemplars of the work that has a huge following, including a fan site run by a teenage boy. First, how many teenage boys are fans of a Garfield-esque comic strip? Second, at least Garfield has a personality, other characters, story lines and humour. Wondercat? Not so much – he seems to basically be an anthropomorphic blob with sunglasses but no speech.
All this makes it sound as though I didn’t enjoy the book, and that isn’t wholly fair – it was fine for what it was, but nothing more than a little light holiday escapism. Plus, the whole time I was reading it I had the chorus from Julie Brown’s song of the same name going around in my head (“Every boy’s got one/give it to me/give me your/give me your/heart”), which was no bad thing. - Alex