Readable, but predictable. ( )

Reviewed by Randstostipher "tallnlankyrn" Nguyen for TeensReadToo.com

All a girl wants to do is find the love of her life, or in this case a high school sweetheart. Fortunately for Rachel Lowenstein, she has just found the guy at her brother's bar mitzvah. He's handsome, a basketball player, and his name is Luke Christiansen. Which is the only problem she has with Luke--his last name. All Rachel hears from her grandmother and family is how she should find a respectable Jewish boy to date and marry. But crushing on Luke may not be the best choice for Rachel since he is far from being Jewish; he celebrates Christmas! So Rachel decides that she is tired of all the problems that she faces, from bad hair to having hardly any friends, and makes up her own teen commandments, which she occasionally changes, and which she hopes to break.

So Rachel begins to change the way she does things. She starts acting dumb in math class, lies to her family, and tries her best to keep Luke a secret. Besides that, Rachel also has to deal with her only best friend, Jen, who is trying to get into the popular crowd; Leah, her only other real friend who keeps on warning Rachel about her wrongdoings; and Howard, Rachel's neighbor turned enemy.

Yet Rachel starts to second-guess her decisions and wonders if they are really worth all the lies and deception when the ultimate tragedy happens to her. Is Luke really the guy for her; is acting dumb in math class worth the "popular" points? Rachel ends up discovering her true self and sees that change just isn't for her.

GOY CRAZY is sweet, tragic, and laugh-out-loud hilarious. With her first teen novel, Ms. Schorr successfully makes her main character understandable, relatable, and, above all, realistic. By the end of the novel, readers will be glad about Rachel's final decisions, yet sad that the novel is over. GOY CRAZY was a fantastic read that left me wanting more. I just hope there will be a follow-up to this novel. ( )

Rachel Lowenstein has all the problems of a typical 15-year-old girl, the main one being she doesn't have a boyfriend. She doesn't like any of the Jewish boys she knows, and figures the others are out of her league. But there is a boy she falls for, the boy who was a waiter at her brother's bar mitzvah party. Rachel knows her parents won't like her going out with a non Jewish boy, so she always arranges to have her neighbor pick her up and double date. Predictably, she finds out that he's pretty hot and they have a lot in common. ( )

http://interactivereader.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-it-possible-to-peak-at-thirteen... ( )