The Dating Game is a lively novel for teens — probably teen girls. The basic idea is that three girls living in northern California start a website for students in their high school with the aim of gathering data for a class. They want to test the hypothesis that boys are more obsessed with sex than girls. The topic is of course dating, and the incentive is that they will act as matchmakers, setting up blind dates for suited couples. The three girls, Holly, Lina and Madison, are 15 and 16, and have limited experience of their own. Only Holly has gone all the way, and that experience doesn’t seem to have given her much wisdom, although her dating expectations are more realistic than Madison, who has a crush on an older boy who has no interest in her, and also than Lina, who dreams of her 25-year-old teacher Dan.

The story here (and in the sequel Breaking Up is Really Really Hard to Do) goes fast and is fun without requiring any serious thought. But the girls come up with some amusing quizzes for their website, and they manage to analyze their data enough to disprove their hypothesis. Author Natalie Standiford has a knack of making her characters flawed but endearing, so you don’t lose patience with them. I don’t know how representative her characters are of California high school students, but they do not remind me of the East Coast teenagers I meet in the classroom. Her characters are wittier and more charismatic, which makes her books enjoyable but less believable.

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.