Top Ten Clues You're Clueless

by Liz Czukas

[Linda]

This review was originally posted on (un)Conventional Bookviews
Top Ten Clues You're Clueless is a sweet, whimsical tale of six teenagers who worked in the same GoodFoods market on Christmas Eve.



Top Ten Clues You're Clueless is a fast read, which is a good thing, because we only follow the main character, Chloe, and her fellow young employees for a few hours. It's impossible to really get to know the characters very well in such a short time, and the story itself was very light, just slightly touching on some important topics before moving on to the next one. Chloe had diabetes, but didn't want her co-workers to know. She also had a crush on one of them, and that was an important part of her inner dialogues and her numerous lists.

Because it was Christmas Eve, the GoodFoods market was going to count how much money had been collected for charity, and the main plot of Top Ten Clues You're Clueless was that it was obviously quite a bit of money missing from the box. And who else would be blamed but the six teens working in the store? The unfairness of that particular way of seeing things was something that really touched me, though, and I'm sure it would have been even worse if I had been the protagonist's age.

Sweet and whimsical, but without much substance, I enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and the lists Chloe kept making were quirky as well. Written in first person present tense from Chloe's perspective, her inner thoughts were just as important as the rest of the story that unfolded around her and the other characters.



I know - it's so nerdy, right? I keep hearing that being a geek is cool now, but I'm not sure the rest of the world has gotten the memo, because I still feel like a pretty big dork compared to a lot of people at my new school. And being insecure makes me want to write more lists, which makes me feel nerdier, which makes me write more lists... You can see my problem.

So that's what I'm doing while I key in the code for my customer's giant bag of limes. It's hard to imagine what a small blond woman could do with that many limes.

I'm really working my way through my mom's paperback mystery collection, so I guess that's something. Something antisocial and vaguely depressing, maybe, but it's something.