'Popular: How a Geek in Pearls Discovered the Secret to Confidence' by Maya van Wagenen

Van Wagenen, Maya. Popular: How a Geek in Pearls Discovered the Secret to Confidence.  Penguin Young Readers Group: New York, 2014. Print

Cover image:
www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Popularity is a pretty loaded topic, isn't it?  Who and what is popular and why they're popular changes almost every day.  If you're one of the "lucky" few to exist in the rarefied echelons of the popular in a high school or junior high school, it seems as if everything ought to just go swimmingly for you.  If you're like Maya Van Wagenen, a Social Outcast, you're barely a few levels above substitute teachers!

It all begins when Maya's parents clean out her father's office.  Upon finding a vintage copy of Betty Cornell's Teen-Age Popularity Guide (circa 1951), Maya decides to embark on a social experiment: each month during the upcoming school year, she will follow the guidelines in one chapter of the book, while journaling about people's reactions to the changes.  Fortunately for Maya, her parents are just weird enough to go along with it, and even encourage her. (Her father, mother, and younger brother participate in reenactments of the Mexican-American War, something that simultaneously bemuses and amuses Maya.)

While Maya was performing her social experiment, she only told her immediate family, leaving her friends, teachers, and others in the dark, leading to sometimes hilarious and not-so-hilarious reactions.

Maya's diary in the months that follow is more than observations of her peers' and teachers' responses to the changes in Maya's wardrobe, hairstyles, and personality.  Maya searches for the meaning of popularity and how she fits into it.  Along the way, Maya includes bits of wisdom from Betty Cornell's book, as well as her own additions, including one gleaned from a teacher's judgment of Maya when she chose to wear longer skirts to school.  In the end, what Maya learns from Betty Cornell can't be solely attributed to changes in her clothes, hair, social status, or even whether or not you go to the snooty private school on the other side of town.

Maya is an engaging narrator.  She's funny, witty, and an excellent writer.  She shares her triumphs equally with her failures, which make her successes much more meaningful. The advantage of Maya using a diary is that we can see what happens when Maya is forced to take one step forward and two steps back.  When her new hairstyle is met with derisive comments, Maya does allow herself a few moments of self-pity, but in the name of the experiment soldiers on. (Let's be honest, we'd probably all shed a few tears if people compared your hair to mushrooms sprouting from the sides of your head.) Best of all, Maya never comes off as preachy. It's kind of hard to, really, especially when you tend to veer toward self-deprecating humor, like she does.  Maya's parents provide colorful background commentary and even some misgivings about Maya's experiment, most notably when her mother balks at taking Maya to the store to purchase a girdle and Maya's father takes her out of school early for a "doctor's appointment," but he takes her to the movies on the grounds that 1) he's a doctor (a Ph.D.), and 2) she has an appointment to hang out with him for the afternoon.  Even Maya's brother Brodie gets in on the experiment when Maya corrals him into helping her paint her nails.  (And that goes about as well as one could expect.)

If I had come across Betty Cornell's Teen-Age Popularity Guide, I might have laughed and shown it to my fellow nerdy classmates and scoffed at it as a hopelessly outdated relic.  Or, I might have learned something.  I like to think I would have learned something.  At any rate, I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone -- from the denizens of the top of the social hierarchy to the substitute teachers of the world -- young or old.  It's never too late to learn something, and Maya Van Wagenen has a lot to teach us.