Playing with Matches

Title: Playing with Matches
Author: Brian Katcher
Publisher: New York: Delacorte Press (2008)
ISBN: 9780385735445 9780385905251 0385905254 0385735448
Pages: 294

4 bookmarks

Leon Sanders is your average teenage guy. Not terribly popular, but has a core group of close friends. He is essentially an unknown in his high school, which is better than Melody, a classmate who was badly burnt as a child and is more of an outcast. In order to escape working on a group project with a classmate he hates, one day Leon decides to work with Melody and discovers that the two of them share many interests and quickly become friends. Soon, feelings start to develop on both sides, but Leon can't get over his obsession with his dream girl Amy. Who will Leon choose, the beautiful but often petty and mean Amy or disfigured but smart and entertaining Melody?

Like much of the YA fiction that I have read, this is a bit cliched and predictable. What normal teenage boy is going to stay with a girl who is amazing but disfigured when he can have a beautiful and popular girl instead? I did like though that at the end, Leon realized that he should have stayed with Melody and that Amy was basically just going to use him. This is your typical story of "it's what's on the inside that counts". Thankfully, it is a quick read and does have some parts that are genuinely funny.

What I liked the most about the story is the transformation that Melody underwent. At the beginning of the book, she is pretty quiet and tries to stay in the background as much as possible. After becoming friends with Leon, she starts to make more friends and becomes a lot more confident and social. It was through Leon's friendship that she was able to start to value herself and not just see herself as a disfigured burn victim, but as a complete person that other people might actually like.