Pinnochio Complex

It’s the summer before senior year, and Jory has some goals: Find a boyfriend. Figure out what she’s passionate about. And save up for a nose job.Well, she figures the nose job will have to come before the boyfriend, but that doesn’t mean she can’t crush on a few guys (including picture-perfect Tyler Briggs) while she’s saving up cash as a delivery girl and dabbling in foreign cinema.

Not that this is a book with OMG-crazy plot twists, but I feel as if saying more about what happens in My Big Nose and Other Disasters would kind of ruin it. It’s a couple of months in a girl’s life, stuff happens, and you can bet she has new-found self-esteem and a little romance by the end of things.

As a girl whose nose is far from button-like, I was interested to see how the author (Sydney Salter) would approach the whole aspiring-to-rhinoplasty thing. Does Jory really have a remarkably big nose, or is it just insecurity? The only indication we have that it might actually be a legitimate honker is that Jory’s mom helps her apply some makeup to minimize its size. (I think I’d heard of this before, but I just had to Google “nose minimizing makeup”—here is an example of what I found.)

Though the idea of a teen scheming to get plastic surgery isn’t exactly hilarious, My Big Nose is full-on funny. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jory’s story, even if I did kind of hate her name at the beginning. The best thing about it is the way the boy encounters are treated—very realistically, I thought. Lots of YA books with “boy crazy” characters are pretty G-rated, which is okay for a certain audience, but sometimes you want a little more. This one strikes a nice balance between those and the skank-fest Gossip Girls. My single, minor, beef with the book was all the "I'm going to die a virgin" talk from Jory. Girl, you're 17. Lots of people don't have sex until after high school ... just give it a year or two.