Me on Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick

Title: Au Revior, Crazy European Chick
Author: Joe Schreiber
Release Date: October 25, 2011
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Perry is a normal high school senior, busy with college prep and playing with his band, until he agrees to go to prom with the foreign exchange student his family is hosting. Then he learns that Gobi isn't as mousy as she first appeared, but instead a rather attractive and extremely lethal assassin. Soon, Perry's on a once in a lifetime journey through New York City with Gobi as she forces him to take her around to her different targets. It'll certainly be a night Perry never forgets.

Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick was thrilling and completely outrageous, quite possibly the most action-packed prom night ever. Everything happens so quickly in such a short book, and while questions are still left at the end in relation to Gobi and her actual motives for more than a few of her actions, we're still left with an exciting (while impossible) story.

Perry is awesome in the way that boring guys can be in books where everything blows up in your face as you're stuck on a rollercoaster ride that never uses the brakes. He's totally normal, he's got some friends, he's in a band, he's getting ready to go to Columbia like his dad wants, and the Gobi shows up with her guns, her knives, and her plastic explosives and everything is shot to hell in one night.

In a book where most of the story takes place over one night, the pacing has to be consistent and quick to keep the reader interested but not rushed. Perhaps there was a time or two when I felt rushed, Perry isn't always so forthcoming about what's happening to him or what he's thinking, but I never knew what was coming, where they would go or who Gobi was after next. All I knew was Gobi had a mission and Perry was flipping out.

It certainly is a different sort of book about prom night. This seemed a bit like a teenage guy's action-filled pedal to the metal escapism version of prom night, the stuff only teenage guy hormone-fueled dreams are made of. That being said, I would suggest this to people looking for a 'not your average prom night' story, because this is so far from average.

(I borrowed a copy of this book from the library.)