Book Review: Stealing Parker by Miranda Kenneally

Title: Stealing Parker
Author: Miranda Kenneally
Series: Hundred Oaks, #2
Genre: Contemporary YA
Amazon | Goodreads
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Release date: October 1, 2012
Source: Gifted a copy from Tara (Thank you!!)

Summary: Parker Shelton pretty much has the perfect life. She’s on her way to becoming valedictorian at Hundred Oaks High, she’s made the all-star softball team, and she has plenty of friends. Then her mother’s scandal rocks their small town and suddenly no one will talk to her.

Now Parker wants a new life.

So she quits softball. Drops twenty pounds. And she figures why kiss one guy when she can kiss three? Or four. Why limit herself to high school boys when the majorly cute new baseball coach seems especially flirty?

But how far is too far before she loses herself completely?

Friends, I really enjoyed CATCHING JORDAN, Miranda Kenneally’s debut, quite a bit. I thought the characters were fun and swoony and I liked the whole “friends becoming more than friends” vibe. I have to honestly say, though, that I’m not entirely sure how I feel about STEALING PARKER, the second book in Miranda’s Hundred Oaks series. I’m conflicted. On the one hand, it was a satisfying, if kind of melodramatic and clichéd, read. On the other hand, TEACHER-STUDENT RELATIONSHIP EEW EEW EEW. I don’t think there is any way ever where a person could make me see this kind of thing in any other light.

So STEALING PARKER is, obviously, about a young girl named Parker who used to be a golden child at Hundred Oaks High. Star of the softball team, super student, etc. But then, her family and her whole life were thrown into turmoil when her mother came out and moved away with her new partner, leaving Parker’s father devastated and stunned, sending her older brother into a drug-induced hipster-spiral, and leaving Parker to fend off all the sudden rumors about being a lesbian herself. It’s this last thing that basically sets the events of STEALING PARKER in motion. See, in order to disprove all of her ignorant, small-minded classmates wrong, Parker starts hooking up with guys all over the place. She basically feels the need to oversex herself. This leads to the aforementioned teacher-student thing that I didn’t really like at all. No offense to Miranda Kenneally, though. And, of course, there’s ANOTHER guy who I liked much better. Who is not a teacher. THANK GOD.

I enjoy very much the way Miranda Kenneally sets each of these books around some kind of sport. I like reading about girls with athletic hobbies who take sports seriously but don’t necessarily sacrifice ALL of their girliness. Parker WAS like that, but friends, she is NOT handling the aftermath of her mom’s bombshell very well at all. She once was THE star on the softball team. She was super close to her mom. But because softball was something that she learned from and shared with her mother, she ditched that shizz right quick because we all know that softball is BUTCH. Now, Parker avoids her mother like the plague, afraid it seems like she might “catch gay.” Parker’s reaction I could at least understand a little bit; I can’t imagine how confusing having her mother come out must have been. But if Miranda Kenneally hadn’t made it a point to note that the people who thought this were the mean, kind of bullyish, small-town ignoramuses who might also have been jealous of Parker’s skills, I would have been really bothered.
Miranda Kenneally offsets this homophobia in other ways, too, but I don’t want to be a HUGE spoiler. Even though, honestly, it’s not difficult to puzzle out at all. And one of the reasons that I liked the OTHER guy, Will , so much is because of the way he acts in light of this SPOILER. You know what? Since I brought him up, let me just shout him out. Will, aka Corndog, is basically the business. He’s funny and sweet and adorable with Parker. I don’t know WHY she spends so much time with the assistant baseball coach, Brian, who is bad news all the time, when she has such a good friend at first in Will, and maybe something more in him later.

UGH BRIAN. Guys, this is really the biggest issue I had with STEALING PARKER. It’s not that he’s a bad guy to start. It’s easy to see why Parker starts crushing on him: he’s one of the only people Parker feels like she can talk to, and he encourages her to get involved again with baseball and softball (even though this kind of fails). They both go to the same church, so they bond over that (I’ll get to the church angle in a sec). But then things get way out of hand, and the truth is that BOTH Parker and Brian should and do know better, but Brian pursues things because he’s still a young guy and a horndog, and Parker pursues it because she thinks she has something to prove. To be honest, I had a hard time understanding Parker’s actions with Brian until, of course, things between them deteriorate and Parker’s affections are being pulled in two directions and THEN, she kind of screws her head on straight. I don’t think Miranda Kenneally did a bad job with their relationship, and with how it completely crosses the line of both appropriate and legal behavior between a student minor and a teacher adult. It was very much based in lust (ugh) and they were both conflicted about it (Brian more than Parker), but still: ICK TO THE MAX. I will always have problems with this kind of relationship, and so my impressions of STEALING PARKER are unavoidably colored by it. I don’t know that I could have ever loved a book where one of the central relationships is like the one between Parker and Brian.

Honestly? THANK GOD FOR WILL. Seriously. He’s kind of AWESOME, and he saves STEALING PARKER from being a bigger problem for me. His budding relationship with Parker is really great.

I know that I said I’d mention the church angle, too, and I should because it’s a big deal in STEALING PARKER. I don’t remember Miranda Kenneally making it such a big thing in CATCHING JORDAN, which takes place in the same town with the same kids (some of whom make appearances here). But Parker and Will and Brian take not only going to church seriously, but their faith, too. Usually I find that kind of thing a little off-putting. I don’t have anything against religion, but…I don’t know. I’d just rather not read about it. But Miranda Kenneally does it in such a way that you never feel like you’re getting beaten over the head with it, or preached to. It’s both a really nice community and a stifling, judgmental one at the same time for Parker and her family, and I thought Parker’s questioning of her faith was totally natural and genuine and normal.

Friends, I’ve said a lot about STEALING PARKER by Miranda Kenneally but it feels like I’ve basically just written a bunch of muddled thoughts. As annoying as that might be, that’s pretty much a good indicator of overall opinion. There were parts I liked: Will, Parker’s best friend (AHH! Name escaping me), even Parker sometimes, because even when I thought she was making bad decisions, they always made sense. There’s lots of gray area to chew on in STEALING PARKER and some of it just gave me the icky feels. But I’ll keep reading Miranda Kenneally‘s series for sure.