Freshman Dorm #1

Overall, I would give this an A minus. I like that it’s an ensemble piece, showing multiple POVs in the same book. Of course, that means it has to be extra-long, the way the pilot episode of a TV show is often as long as a movie! But the characters are well-drawn, not flat, and the settings (rooms, scenery, etc.) are much more vivid than they are in Roommates or Campus Fever. Unlike the other series, where things didn’t get really interesting until book 2, this one grabbed me right away.

Welcome to University of Springfield, in Western Springs, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder. (Not Seattle, as one reviewer mistakenly thought!)

So it starts with a flashback to the summer between high school and college. We get our three main characters.

Winnie Gottlieb: the free spirit. We get it; we GET IT. Funny: I find her to be the least interesting. She was raised by a psychiatrist single mom, who is permissive, but Winnie has never taken advantage of that. She’s not wild, just quirky, and when you get down to it, not as much of a free spirit as she appears to be. She’s short, with a toned figure and short, spiky dark hair.

KC (Kahia Cayenne) Angeletti: business major rebelling against her hippie parents. She’s somewhat tall, with long, curly dark hair, and her dazzling beauty is often commented on. She’s practical, which is sometimes a good thing; she solved the crisis when Winnie got to campus and found she didn’t have a dorm room because she’d spaced sending in her deposit. But she also pretended not to be in when the others came by wanting to go out for pizza. And she didn’t put up any decorations in her dorm room. (Although it wouldn’t surprise me if one thing she did bring was her much-read and highlighted copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged!) She says flat out that she doesn’t want college to be an extension of high school. I have to say, I don’t disapprove of that stance. Especially when she recalls how in her senior year, she blew off an interview with another college (and blew her chance to get in) because Winnie was having a crisis. Can’t keep doing that! Right now, she’s close to being Randian, but she’ll soften up as the series goes on. For one thing, she’s going to join a sorority so she can make business contacts, and how can she do that without also making social contacts? 

Faith Crowley: the mom of the group. Theater major, but she wants to work behind the scenes. Which I like. I-have-to-act/sing/dance-or-I’ll-die gets old, and it’s nice to see some appreciation for the crew. If it wasn’t for the crew, actors would be standing in darkness on an empty stage. She’s earnest, sincere, and a lot of positive things, but there will be times when she has to grow a spine. She has long blonde hair, which she usually wears in a braid. Overalls are her default outfit, to further the cute farmgirl image, but they are practical to wear when working backstage!

This being the first installment, it’s mostly world-building and character establishment. Not much plot, just stuff that happens during orientation week. So we get the lay of the land: The Beanery, where KC works (briefly), Mill Pond (so called because it used to be just that, before this was a campus), and Luigi’s Pizza. We also meet a lot of supporting and background characters. Such as:

Brooks Baldwin: Faith’s boyfriend since early high school. He’s an athlete, and yes, he and Faith are not going to last long. He’s a bit overwhelmed by the campus and the teeming student body, but his hickishness is not exaggerated or played for laughs.

KC has a single, but Faith’s roommate is Lauren Turnbell-Smythe. Poor little rich girl, with an overbearing mother and a weight problem, but she’ll have an arc not unlike Peggy’s, on Mad Men. I like her a lot. Oh, and one of the ways we know she’s rolling in money is, she comes equipped with a computer and a CD player! No joke: that was serious hardware in 1990. She also has a TV and a microwave oven, but I had more than one classmate who brought those things to campus. Just that theirs were castoffs or bought at a thrift store, while Lauren’s are undoubtedly brand-new.

Winnie’s roommate is Melissa McDormand, an athlete on scholarship, which is the only way she can afford college. And we meet Kimberly Dayton, a dance major in Faith’s dorm, Freya, an opera singer from Germany, and Dante, another theater major. Kimberly will be a POV character, but Freya and Dante are always in the background; indicators of what’s happening. In the theater department, there’s Meredeth (does he have a last name?). Christopher Hammond, a junior, stunningly handsome, student director, officer in Omega Delta Tau. IOW, Mr. Wonderful.

And Winnie meets Josh Gaffney! Hair flopping in his eyes, beat-up jeans, twine bracelet and an earring. Mr. Grunge! Well, almost: he needs a goatee. He’s playing Frisbee (should be Hacky-Sack), and is majoring in computer science. And he’d like to take a year off and hack around the country on a motorcycle. Foreshadowing! Winnie knows “a lot of people are interested in computers”. Lauren has one; of course she’s the only character besides Josh who does, because back then, one had to be either super-rich, or a byte-head. Which Winnie can’t believe Josh is: he looks more like a musician or a poet.

So, what happens in this installment? Well, KC gets a job on the first day: waitressing at the Beanery. It’ll be easy, because she spent years working in her parents’ cafe. Faith goes over to the theater department, and one of the first signs of friction between her and Brooks is when his map-reading almost fails to get them there. After much pother, she gets chosen to be Hammond’s assistant on Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, which means she’ll be in his pocket a lot.

Tri Beta, the top sorority on campus, will be a major player. KC wants to pledge, and Lauren has to. Her mom was in Tri Beta a generation ago, so Lauren has to be a Tri Beta, “or else”. We’ll find out or-else what down the line. Courtney Conner is the president, Marielle Danner is some kind of officer, and they’re both well-rounded characters. Courtney is pretty much perfect, but pays a high price for it, as we’ll find out later. Marielle is a good antagonist. A senator’s daughter from Texas, so she has a drawl, not a twang. There’s a good scene where she’s interviewing Lauren, who doesn’t know who or what she is, so you can imagine how well it goes. I love this quote: “Marielle touched the corners of her mouth, as if she had just eaten something slightly messy.” This after she flat out tells Lauren that Courtney had to talk her out of downvoting her.

It goes downhill from there, of course. Even Courtney disparages Lauren’s appearance, and tells KC it would be in Lauren’s best interest if she dropped out before she’s squeezed out. Mark Geisslinger (Marielle’s SO, and he’s a piece of work too) sets her up with Hammond (I am not typing “Christopher” over and over, sorry) for the “Trash Your Roommate” prank. Hammond is a gentleman about it, but Lauren is still humiliated. And furious with KC when she figures out KC knew but didn’t tell her.

And KC feels terrible about that, but her pledge status hung in the balance. Which makes her question certain things: is it fair that people give her breaks just because she’s a classic beauty? Is she a good person inside? Is social climbing worth it, if it hurts decent people? Especially when said decent person, Lauren, let KC charge a semi-formal outfit to her own credit card, and lets KC borrow her BMW? When Mark and Marielle come in to the Beanery and start throwing their weight around, KC balances her karma by dumping their milkshake and coffee on them. Which ends not only her pledge tenure with Tri Beta, but also her job at the Beanery. (This  is the start of a long line of jobs that KC either quits, or loses, or that were only temporary, or that just don’t get mentioned again.)

Meanwhile, what of Winnie? Well, she goes to a toga party, drinks straight rum, goes to Josh’s room and wakes up the next morning not knowing what happened. What did happen was, she peacefully zonked out before anything else could happen. And IYAM, she’s lucky it wasn’t a matter of passing out before she could *stop* something from happening that she didn’t want to. (See Roommates #1 and #10.) But if anything had happened, it would not have been her first time. She gave her v-chip to a guy named Travis, another American in Paris, after “too much wine”. In this case, though, the next morning, Winnie puts on an act, first to the other girls, then to Josh, like she’s a woman-of-the-world and had the most fantastic time the night before. Excruciating to read about, and no one is fooled. 

(I can’t recall alcohol ever coming into play without something negative happening. Not always bad-bad, but never a harmless good time. And not even a mention of pot smoking, even with characters who are otherwise firmly in the weed demographic. Also, I’m pretty sure nobody smokes. Which is completely unrealistic for the time period. I shudder now to think how dense the air was on my college campus.)

And then there’s the matter of Winnie being pretty much the roommate you hope you don’t get stuck with. She’s a slob. She comes in late, or so late it’s early, and makes noise. She took Melissa’s top sheet to make Faith a toga for the party! It takes a while before we actually meet Melissa, and we get her POV before she and Winnie interact. She’s understandably fed up with Winnie’s nonsense, and Winnie is humbled for perhaps the first time in her life. (She really should have told Winnie what the reader is told: because Melissa is on athletic scholarship, she “literally couldn’t afford to do anything but her best.”)

And Faith has decided that she and Brooks will have *their* first time. Which I find astounding, that they’ve been together for years and have never consummated, not even on prom night, or after graduation, or just because they wanted to. It’s even less plausible than Sam and Jonathan, in Roommates. And it still doesn’t happen, because as soon as they’re alone together, it sinks in to Faith that it’s already too late. They’re behind the curve as it is, and they’ll never mature and gain experience and everything one is supposed to do in college, if they’re still bound by a high-school relationship. So what was supposed to be a night of romance becomes a breakup. However, the end of their relationship will not be the end of Brooks as a character. Stay tuned.

This is an interesting way to cover the high-school-sweethearts-break-up-in-the-first-month-of-college issue. Faith doesn’t have to call Brooks in another time zone and be told “He’s out with his girlfriend.” They were growing apart on the same campus, so it’s better that she initiates the breakup, to rip off the band-aid.  

And that’s where we are: Faith and Brooks are no more, but Faith will have all she can handle in the theater department. KC has no job and no sorority. Lauren is stuck pledging a sorority she doesn’t want to be in, and that doesn’t truly want her (just her mother’s alumni donations). Winnie is stuck living in the same dorm as Josh, which is going to be super awkward, and she hopes she can clean up her act enough to mend fences with Melissa. And classes start tomorrow!

Also, when I bought this, it was shrink-wrapped, because it came with a card, the size of a credit card, that had a mood-ring kind of spot on it. Press it and it changed color to indicate your mood. I kept it for a while, but it’s probably in a landfill now.