The Boy of My Dreams by Dyan Sheldon

What is it about?

This is a novel about a girl's obsession with finding and falling in love with the one and only perfect guy.The main character of this story is Michelle Brindisi (usually called Mike), a sixteen-year old girl, living in a small town of America. She has two best friends. Hope Perez is her newest best friend, a girl she can share all her feminine secrets with that she can't really share with her oldest best friend, Bobby (Robert Bone), because he's a boy. Her best friends call Michelle `Mike'. Most recently Mike keeps thinking about falling in love and meeting the boy of her dreams, whom she refers to as `Him'. It's exciting and natural to talk about all this to Hope but Bone thinks “her hormones are damaging her brain". Of course, Mike finally does meet `Him' and the book explores how this new and important event in a young girl's life can ultimately change when already established relationships.

Mike is worrying about not finding her boy-of-her-dream, when one day she met Bill Copeland, a college student who waits tables at a chic French café, Chez Moi. Mike fell in love with Bill on the first time she saw him and thought that Bill, who is actually a best friend of Mark, Bobby’s big brother, is the man of her dreams. Despite the serious misgivings of her oldest friend, Bone, who thinks that hormones have damaged her brain, Mike becomes convinced that Bill, a gorgeous college student, represents her romantic destiny. Then they start dating.

However, Mike is in passion-filled heroin of Bill; everything is about Bill. She likes what Bill’s like and hate what Bill’s hate. She is so mesmerized by him that she is unaware of her mother's growing romance with John, the mechanic. Mike also ignores her old friends, Hope and Bone, the latter of whom she has made a pact with to marry if they are still single by the time they are 30. Mike is even unrealized that Bone has a crush on her. When her mother suggests that she write her term paper on a comparison of Romeo and Juliet (old-fashioned love at first sight) with When Harry Met Sally (best friends falling in love), Mike remember about Bone and Hope, and realize that she missed them. However, when that happens, she has already misses Bone's interest in her, and he moves on to Hope.

Once hormones have settled, and when her preoccupation with her boyfriend causes her to neglect her pet tortoise and he nearly dies, Mike begins to see love and friendship more clearly. A cute ending, when Mike claims once again to have found the boy of her dreams, is sure to bring a smile.

In my opinion The Boy of My Dreams is a lighthearted and quick read novel, with a meaningful message about love and friendship. On the other hand, the cover of the book was not very appealing to me and seemed to have a more 80s feel to the design, rather than a modern 90s look. The drawing of the two boys made them look too similar, which lead me to believe the storyline was to go a certain way.

What happen in the end?

This teenage romance novel ends unexpectedly. Instead of having Mike and Bill together as a happy-ended couple, I got surprised to see that Bill is not Mike’s boy-of-her-dream. The ending finds Mike crashing her grocery cart, again (it has been happen in the middle of the story, but is not highlighted), into the "real" boy of her dreams, Jack Abrams. Jack is Dr. Abrams’s son, and although the story about Jack is only a little told, he becomes the other important and main character of the story. Unfortunately, about Mike and Jack’s finally found each other is not told a lot either.

Recommended to:

The book is a very easy and enjoyable read, but will probably only appeal to teenage girls, and perhaps young adults, too. It is by no means a challenging book, but sometimes it is rewarding enough to read a book in an afternoon. This book is definitely a good candidate to read on a cool rainy afternoon with a box of chocolates. It has a lot of humor with a realistic attitude to it and tells us mostly about friendship and love, things that teens, will be interested to. Also, Mike's use of language seemed older, but her reactions were more suited to the young teenage mould.