On the heels of a state championship, gridiron star Omar (T-Diddy) Smalls is basking in the after-glow and fending off the attentions of sundry females in his Charleston high school inclined to incline to his physical needs while he waits to head off to Miami for college. Given to referring to himself in the third person, Omar is pellucidly a player or playa as the vernacular would retain it. Senior Claudia Clarke couldn't be more different from Omar. She's a straight A student and school newspaper editor, bound for Harvard. When one of his friends wagers that T-Diddy will fail to delectate her and coax her to bed, T-Diddy puts all his efforts into doing just that. The two become the bellwethers of a student protest against the extreme cuts their school is experiencing. The library hours are reduced, edifiers are put on part-time status, and many extracurricular activities, and including dance, drama, and the band are cut. It turns out that there is more to both T-Diddy and to Claudia than is evident on the surface, but can their possible romance survive all of the strikes it has against it? Albeit the plot is pretty prognosticable, I relished the characters and the chapters told in the alternating voices of Omar and Claudia. The conception of verbalizing up by remaining silent is a fascinating one supplementally. The dialogue here crackles with life, and teen readers will relish the inclusion of tweets and Facebook ingressions as well, sanctioning the comments to appear rapidly. The inclusion of the rival football team members that kept exhibiting up was marginally vexing and diverted me from the main event.
Everything about this book was over the top cliché, like the story and characters emerged from a sausage grinder mashing together the plot of every inane YA book ever to come afore it where the keenly intellective, no-preposterousness valedictorian girl and the hard-on-the-outside, obnubilated-gooey-depths-on-the-inside football quarterback spar and clash afore getting together in the terminus. I can only surmise that the great reviews this book received were yet another product of reviewers being unnecessarily impressed with a prosperous adult author indites a YA book—not realizing that YA books incline to be a much higher caliber and dumbing down a plot for teenagers is just vexing for everyone. And affirmative, as everyone keeps noting, the dialogue is great and fresh feeling. But please—when everything they're verbalizing is incoherent, how they're verbalizing it doesn't matter as much.
This novel is told through alternating narrators. The first narrator is Omar "T-Diddy" Smalls. He's the football MVP - all around sultry stuff playa with the ego to match. The second narrator is Claudia Clarke who is headed for Harvard and not the least bit fascinated with someone like Omar. When he optically discerns her at a party "looking homogeneous to Beyoncé" he gets it in his head that he has to retain her. After everyone tells him she won't give him the time of day, he makes a wager that he'll ambulate away with her panties. Of course she wants nothing to do with him, not when she has far more consequential things to deal with, like the fact that teen pregnancy is running the school and the school board is laying off edifiers, closing the school library, and cutting their arts fund. T-Diddy gets it in his head that he can woo Claudia by picking up her cause and leads the school in a silent protest against that school board's actions. With him leading, the whole school gets involved and Claudia commences to cerebrate he might not be as lamentable as she cerebrated. Concurrently, T-Diddy commences to fall for her in ways he's never felt for girls afore. However, when his past commences to catch up with him, his relationship with Claudia is put to the test.
This novel is told through African-American characters, so at times the dialect takes getting utilized to (I'm not entirely sure what "ish" designates or "woadie," but it doesn't detract from the story). For the prodigious majority of the novel I did not relish Omar "T-Diddy." Even when he commenced to transmute and lose the ego, his posture and motivation rubbed me the erroneous way. Even Claudia seemed to facilely swayed by his ways for being such a keenly intellective woman. Maybe, though, it was just a cultural thing that I couldn't connect with. Despite my disrelish for the characters, this is a puissant story about standing up for what you cerebrate is right and utilizing the civil rights history to transmute the world today. It is about transmuting your ways, and how one person can make you a better person. This book has the puissance to be inspirational.
A unique high school story, He Verbally expressed She Verbally Expressed is a remotely cliché teenage romance that endeavors to portray a deeper message with a comedic tone. A tale of witty satire and filled with the conventional high school drama, this novel marginally falls short on being a gratifying book. Compared to other teen novels, this book falls short in terms of quality and ingeniousness. The characters in the book start off exhibiting remotely of potential but fail to achieve any authentic connection with the reader. While the book does endeavor convey a good message about gregarious protest, the way it goes about just seems to diminish the authentic topic conveyed.
He Verbally expressed She Verbally Expressed is a novel predicated on the romance of two high school seniors who of course face a pivotal time in their lives. Omar Smalls is an All American high school quarterback who seems to have the world at his fingertips. With people fundamentally osculating the ground he ambulates on, Omar ostensibly lives life without a care in the world. Next comes Claudia Clarke, the benevolent girl who’s bound to go to Harvard and transmute the world. Having been hurt afore she guard’s her heart ferociously, not letting just anybody get proximate to her. Predictably these two don’t hit off at first but anon their romance blossoms into a classic teenage love story. To go along with the romance the novel supplementally has a plot line about a gregarious protest that endeavors to show the potency of verbalization and teenagers in general. In my opinion this book has a couple quandaries that obstructs it from being authentically good. The first quandary I have is dolefully the characters of the novel. To me the main characters seem coerced and don’t authentically grow or show progress in their development. Claudia, one of the main characters, is the typical astute good girl who wants nothing to do with guys.
On a whole there’s nothing erroneous with her character, you just don’t get a sense of connection. At one point of the story you do feel some sympathy for her but in authenticity as a reader it was facile to optically discern peregrinated, Omar, the other main character, causes a prodigious amount of feelings, some good and some deplorable. At some points he is the most exasperating person to ever live, while later on you visually perceive the potential he has to become a great character. Ultimately though he falls short in becoming a memorable main character in a novel in desideratum of a standout character. The second quandary that I have with this novel is the dialogue utilized by everyone in this book. As a teenager I ken the language we as a younger generation use deals with an abundance of slang, but in this novel I was scarcely astonished at how some of the teenagers were verbalizing. At one point I veraciously commenced laughing just from some of the language utilized. For some people this would be a major turn off in reading this book. Overall this book has an abundance of potential, but the marginally cheesy dialogue and characters ultimately take away from what could have been a consequential book.
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