Fiction of the Week for July 6: Last Dance at the Frosty Queen

This week's featured fiction book is Richard Uhlig's Last Dance at the Frosty Queen.  Selector Helena has given us her personal For / Against for the title below..

For	Against
I liked Arty’s closeted “best” friend Barry.  He was an annoying character but always funny, with his spotty vocabulary and drama pin.	The dead-end setting for the book, struck me, initially, as really cliché – like something out of a movie, and, you know, how inauthentic most movies are.  I thought, “Is this Footloose : The Novelization, 25 years after the fact?”  And then, when a redneck sherrif made his appearance a few chapters in, it was all I could do to continue reading.
I thought it was unexpected and cool that Mrs. Kaye made herself over to look like Annie Lennox when she hit rock bottom and needed a change.  She could have done so much worse for inspiration.	The alliterative appellations for Arty’s car (his family’s cast-off hearse) were not funny.
Spoiler alert (move your mouse pointer over to reveal!): The Stiles’ arson didn’t add anything to the plot but the last scene between Arty and Mr. Stiles was good and intense.	At times, Vanessa, the big-city girl, who sweeps Arty off his feet, seemed plausible and, at others, seemed like a mash-up of the troubled but lovely ladies in Girl Interrupted and Crazy Beautiful (i.e. Angelina Jolie and Kirsten Dunst).  Did I mention that the author, Richard Uhlig, is a screenwriter?
The relationship of give-and-take and learning-and-growing between Arty and Vanessa was well done by Mr. Uhlig.  It reminded me of the one between and Luke and Stephanie in the movie The Wackness, which I probably enjoyed a little too much, based on my personal nostalgia for the mid-nineties, which the movie most definitely fanned.  “Peace out forever.”
The ending was clever and solved the problem of how Arty is going to get away from Harker City pithily.

Did you read Last Dance at the Frosty Queen?  Got your own list of For / Against for it, or another title?  Let us know in the comments!

Helena is a teen librarian, but she reads widely - everything from teen coming-of-age stories to Agatha Christie to picture books about cars with her one-and-a-half year old son Lucas.

Comments

[Hamdi]

I have never read Last Dance at the Frosty Queen
yet and i've never read a book by Richard Uhlig
so i am defintely keep an eye out for this book! The For/Against chart is really creative and it gives me mmore information about the book which i like alot! The cover of the book looks great and the characters sounds like there facing real-life problems which many of us can realte too!

[Devi]

i havent read Last Dance at the Frosty Queen. i have that book on hold. but you never know when it will come to u.

[Michelle]

ya i have the book on hold too...i didnt read the for/against because i want the story to be a surprise

[Koren]

This is seuch a cool book. It is like a life changing story!!!!!!!

[Allison]

sounds like a good book. I should put it on hold.

[Sarah]

i would love to read this book

[Ar----]

The For/Against section was creative but a bit of a spoiler dont u think ?

[Alan H.]

Ar----: Yes, I spoiler-mouseovered the most specific details of it, but it's difficult to discuss a book in any detail without giving away some of the plot. I myself tend not to mind broad plot details, but if you're very spoiler-averse you can always avoid the Book of the Week threads if you haven't read the book yet & are intending to.

[Helena]

Another coming-of-age book I liked is The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. It's quite different from Last Dance - but still in the boy-grows-up vein.

[Shazia]

Wow, I love books like Last Dance at the Frosty Queen because I feel that people can relate to it and learn from it as well. Another book that I think is really good is Fall On Your Knees by Anne-Marie Macdonald. I recommend people to read that book and iam sure that whoever reads it will enjoy it as much as i did.

[kiu]

I think the plot sounds pretty interesting...I'll put this on hold.

[Shel]

I finished reading Last Dance at the Frosty Queen by Richard Uhlig last night at 1 am (or should I say this morning). I just couldn't put that book down. Yes, that's how much I liked the book. This quirky, witty, and captivating story has it all--romance, mystery and suspense, and humour. Man, the author sure knows how to grasp onto readers' attention! I felt like I was trudging along with Arthur Flood (the protagonist) as he tries to cope with family issues, relationship crisis and financial problems, and struggles to escape from this small town and other people's expectations of him. It's a very entertaining yet angst-filled read. So good idea, fellas, for putting it on hold!

[Shel]

By the way, I also recommand Just Like That and Becoming Ruby to all you book-lovers who like coming-of-age stories.

[Nare]

Cant wait to get my hands on this book :)

[Kyle]

I just finished reading Part One of "Last Dance at the Frosty Queen" and am quite hooked.
Chapter 37 was the funnest chapter for me as one bad thing after another happened to poor Arty. :(

[Edmee]

I read "Last Dance at the Frosty Queen", and at first I decided that I didn't really like it. But as I thought about the characters more, I decided that the novel was kind of good. In my opinion, it's not the best book I've ever read, but it's certainly not the worst.

Does anyone else see bizarre similarities between Richard Uhlig’s “Last Dance at the Frosty Queen” and Jerry Spinelli’s “Star Girl”? Think about it. :P

[Gunjan]

Currently I am reading a book called Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It is a really challenging book which I am planning to finish very soon. It is about real life situations people confronted during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I love reading world literature!!

[Jeanette]

I finished reading this book a few nights ago.I thought it was at best ok. I can always tell if a book is really good because, a really good book will get me so caught up in it that I forget the outside world, literally my parents have to sometimes take the book right out of my hands to get my attention and this one didn't do that for me. It took me few nights to get through. Some of the things that I did like were the nicknames for the hearse. One of the things that I didn't like was that not everything was described very well, it took me almost half of the book to figure out what a hearse was, it's not a term I've ever heard used before and it wasn't really explained of described in the book. Sometimes I felt like things blindsided you, one minute Artie was talking about one thing and the next it was totally different. I probably wouldn't recommend this book to people. It wasn't all that interesting, though the ending was unexpected and that was very cool.

[Lynn]

Is this a good book?

[Anusan R.]

Its sounds like a good book. I am finishing up another book then I will move on to this.

[Jasmine]

I haven't read this book.....it seems like it's worth the read......but it doesn't seem like the books I usually read....such as.."Blood and Chocolate"....That book is the third best book I've read.....It's about this girl who's a werewolf and she live with her mom and it's about how she is suppose to mate with the heaad of their pack but she goes out of her way and starts a romance with a human...and then how she figures that the human only liked her outside and when he found out that she was a werewolf he ran from her and she learned to live without him and at the end she ends up with the one she rejected.....the head of the pack................Wonderful addictive book which is also, by the way, a movie but the book is wayyy better

I highly recommend it to anyone who loves the world of fantasy and reality mixed up......

[Linda]

I thought the cover design was really creative. (I heart the very bright ice cream that stands out from the rest of the background) :)
The main character Arty is a graduating high school student who just dreams of escaping to a more glamorous life. But his relationship affairs are kind creepy. >.> Overall i thought the book was pretty good.

[Sibyl]

This seems like a really interesting book and I might consider putting it on hold. I think that this book would be really cool to ready because the For/Against chart gave me more information.

[Grace]

I really enjoyed the book "Last Dance At the Frosty Queen". This book is hilarious and full of interesting plots.Hope you enjoyed the book like me!

[Grace]

i really enjoyed the book. Richard Uhlig really made this story hilarious and full of plot. Hope you enjoyed the book as much as myself!