Mafia Girl

Gr 8 Up—Seventeen-year-old Gia, the daughter of New York City's most notorious Mafia boss, leads a privileged life, but what she wants most is to have a normal existence in which her family is safe. When she and her best friend are pulled over for underage drinking and driving, Gia is immediately attracted to the arresting police officer—despite his lack of interest. Not one to be denied, Gia does everything in her power to wear down his resistance, all the while running for school president, posing for Vogue, and surviving mob hits. In the end, she gets what she wants but at a price. Told from the first-person point of view, Blumenthal's novel gives the audience insight into Gia, and while it believably captures the unfiltered, frenetic thoughts going on in many teens' minds, the stream-of-consciousness approach has its limitations; not only does the style disrupt the flow of the narrative, making it choppy and uneven, but it diminishes Gia's character, too. Run-on sentences, lack of punctuation, acronyms, and random capitalization reveal Gia's shallowness and immaturity. She's annoyed that her classmates judge her by her family, yet she easily dismisses them as being spoiled and stuck-up. The secondary characters, especially Officer Cross, are underdeveloped and forgettable with the exception of Gia's friend Clive, who's deserving of his own story. Promising idea, underwhelming result.—Audrey Sumser, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Mayfield, OH