please ignore vera dietz

1. I got Please Ignore Vera Dietz from my school librarian who told me she was reading it on the subway and crying hysterically. So of course I knew I had to read it.

2. Please Ignore Vera Dietz is about a girl named Vera who works as a pizza delivery girl and lives with her ex-alcoholic and "parsimonious" father. Vera's best friend Charlie, also the boy she has been in love with since she was a child, has just died, and she is trying to deal with this, as well as how much she hated him because of the terrible things he did to her the year before he died. The book goes back and forth from her past memories of Charlie to what is happening in the present, and also goes between the point of views of Vera, her father, dead Charlie, and the Pagoda, which is a building in the town that I still cannot seem to understand the significance of. Yes, the inanimate object has a point of view.

3. I really really love Vera and respect her. Charlie is right: she's classy. And I give her a lot of credit, considering her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a stripper who had her at the age of seventeen, and then ran off with a podiatrist when Vera was twelve. So considering all of this, Vera is pretty cool. Plus her love for Charlie melts my heart. The only thing I don't like is all of the alcohol she consumes throughout the book. Not that I have a problem with alcohol, its just that it makes me super nervous when she drinks as she delivers her pizzas...especially since her father and grandfather were alcoholics! But even with that, Vera is still pretty great!

4. I loved Vera, and I loved Charlie. And I loved them together. Honestly, by the end of the book I was so in love with Charlie, despite everything he did. Charlie was NOT a bad person, no matter what he did. And it KILLED ME because the whole book I was getting that VERA AND CHARLIE MUST BE TOGETHER feeling but then I would remember that Charlie is dead. So sometimes I would get the VERA AND JAMES MUST BE TOGETHER feeling instead. But anyway I loved the intensity, especially around part five. And dead Charlie was pretty cool. And oh so sweet. Dead Charlie narration plus Vera narration equaled a really awesome book.