I Love You, Beth Cooper

I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle, 253 pages

The story starts during graduation, when dork-with-a-sweating-problem Denis Cooverman throws caution (and tradition) to the wind and uses his valedictorian speech to declare his love for head cheerleader Beth Cooper. Seems like a monumental escape until Beth and a couple of her cheerleading pals show up at Denis' house that evening. The rest of the book follows the escapades of Denis, his possibly gay best friend Rich and the trio of cheerleaders as Beth's homicidal military boyfriend Kevin tries to kill Denis. Much like so many teen movies, the entire book takes place on graduation night.

I bring up teen movies because I Love You, Beth Cooper reads just like one, and nearly goes as quickly. The characters are pretty two-dimensional and all of the stereotypes are there: ditzy cheerleaders, nerdy guys who lust after the aforementioned cheerleaders, the annoying best friend, parents who only appear long enough to establish that no, the main character wasn't raised by wolves. And the plot, well, let's just say that Doyle borrows liberally from John Hughes.

What makes this a fun book is that Doyle is conscious about his theft and embraces the stereotype. Each chapter starts with a quote from a different teen movie from the last, say, 30 years. Doyle attributes them to the character who said them, leaving out the movie, which makes for a fun (well, for me anyway) game of trying to guess the movie by the quote. His writing is very self-aware — a few times he refers to characters "processing the contents of the previous paragraph" and makes cracks about the large-print readers of the book — and intelligent.

It doesn't surprise me that they made a teen movie out of this. I haven't seen it, but I can't imagine it would be nearly as smart and clever as the book. If you're forced to choose between book and movie, go for the book — reading it won't take much longer than watching it.