Princess on the Brink (Princess Diaries Series #8) Book

I've been betrayed by meg cabot.
princess diaries 8 is so bad that i might have to give up my faith in the entire series.

to begin with, michael and mia broke up. which sucks, but was basically inevitable. what makes it betrayal is the WAY that they were broken up. the first major problem is that for the past few books, cabot has sort of drifted from the characterizations that made the first three installments such a guilty pleasure. now it's more of a pop-culture-driven, facile extrapolation of an originally pleasing premise. so the characters of michael and mia, as depicted in this book, do not feel like the same ones that i met that happy winter in puerto rico.

some of that can be explained away by the aging of the characters. whereas the first three books comprised a single semester of mia's freshman year, successive books have been as sporadic as a week or two's worth of entries per year of mia's life.

but not all of it.
here's the problem. mia and michael still have not consummated their relationship. this was getting to be boring, because (aside from the fact that cabot did the story already in all american girl) there seemed to be no real reason for mia's hesitation. it was basically the same conversation over and over again. like watching season 4 of dawson's creek except with michael moscovitz, who is yummy, instead of pacey (who is not). so cabot cooked up this ridiculous scheme for mia to offer herself as a sacrifice, basically, to keep michael from moving to japan to study for a year.

weak sauce to begin with, right?
but it got worse. much worse.
instead of merely having michael turn her down (which was actually in character, because he felt her manipulation and didn't want to get her hopes up), cabot sprung on us the most unwelcome news that michael had been tooling around with judith gershner during the events of princess diaries III.

way harsh. and untrue to the character of michael. there was, certainly, no reason to believe that he was as virginal as mia. lilly mentioned, for example, a girl at "hebrew camp." but judith gershner? i wanted to wretch!

and that's even before i get started on her character of JP, aka the guy who doesn't like corn in the chili. his crush on mia is painful. her reaction to it (blissful ignorance) is worse. and they used this, plus the gershner issue, to break up michael and mia.

i may never recover my lost innocence...