Big fat D. Cardboard characters, juvenile plot, gratuitous slapstick, and about a sixth-grade sensibility. It gets better, but this series is definitely the poorest of the three.
I’m switching gears now for Campus Fever, which started in 1985. I read the second installment before I read the first. The others are okay for what they are, but this one is so awful that if I’d read it first, I never would have tried the others. Well, here goes!
Hastings College in Boston is the setting, and we meet Cathy Thomas as her plane is coming in for a landing at Logan Airport. How can you bring everything you need for college on a plane? The only people I ever knew at college who flew in were international students, and they’d budgeted to buy what they couldn’t bring.
Well, Cathy may not have brought bedding and a desk lamp, but she brings every trope about Midwesterners. She wears a white blouse and plaid kilt the first day; in fact, all her clothes are generic mall gear. She’s never tasted alcohol. She draws a blank when someone mentions The Wreck of the Hesperus. In fact, almost any time someone makes a cultural reference, her response is, “Duh, what’s that mean?”
At the airport, she meets Amy Trevlyn, pseudo-punk (c’mon, a true punk would not be in college), and before she gets into her dorm, Rachel Pirnie, nouveau riche from NYC. Rachel is a trip: she wears head-to-toe designer, her family’s driver brought her to school, she brought alcohol — “enough to make a decent batch of kir”. She even identifies the dorm (Windsor Hall) as “Great building…Georgian.” Totally urban, and fun to read about. And if you’re wondering why she’s not at one of the Seven Sisters, she already flunked out of Vassar. (The next book is Amy’s, so I’ll wait until then to describe her fully.)
Cathy’s roommate is Paula Heil, genius computer major when computers were mysterious things. Other residents of Windsor Hall are Leslie Shaeffer, “mouseburger”; Susan Radcliffe and Daphne Reisling, bluebloods; Nan Deluca, stoner; Agatha Mitchell, Texas debutante; and Terry Smith, jock. Alluded to but not shown are Cynthia Woyzek, Jacqui Orsini, and Louisa (no last name yet).
Also at the airport Cathy, meets Mr. Wonderful, John Wickland. A junior, a Phi Delt, gentlemanly and handsome, with dreamy brown eyes. He helps Cathy with her luggage, and because she’s fumbling with a tennis racket, he calls her Chrissy (as in Evert), which he’ll continue to do throughout the story. Cathy swoons, and apparently doesn’t notice or even meet any other guys during the first month of classes. Well, except for one guy who notices her, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, we have to have Susan and Daphne throw down. Susan has designs on John, too and won’t tolerate Cathy trying to cut in on her action. Amy stands up for Cathy, which makes them BFF, and at a check-out-the-new-prospects Tri Delt party, John shows up…with Susan. (We later find out it was a blind date.) Cathy asks John to dance, Susan shuts that down, and Cathy leaves in tears.
But she’d already been at the party long enough to meet someone else. Richard Mealy (some of the names in this are so on-the-nose, they could be zinc oxide), unattractive, socially inept, but still a member of Tri Delt. (He must be a triple legacy, is all I can figure.) He’ll come into it later…
Meanwhile, since Cathy was a track star in high school, she tries out for Hastings’ team, and gets on. I find that somewhat odd — wouldn’t it make more sense for her to have been accepted onto the team before orientation, and maybe on scholarship as well (like Melissa in FD)? Anyway, she has that to deal with, as well as a few basic freshman dilemmas: her schedule doesn’t leave much time to get across campus, she can’t write an essay for beans — which leads to the classic exchange. “I’m afraid I don’t understand—“ [her grade] “I’m afraid you don’t understand. Hence your grade.” Towards the end she tells John, “The truth is, I keep waiting for something else to go wrong!” Not a healthy attitude! Try taking charge of your life, huh?
Then there’s a mixer; Cathy gets loaded for the first time in her life, and guess what kind of impression she makes on John. Later, we get his POV; he’s wondering if she likes him. Like he’d even notice, much less get hung up on, one freshman girl who he met for two minutes? And Cathy is not distracted by anyone else, either. It’s really jarring, how there seem to be no “extras”; no unnamed characters, only the key players.
Now, are you ready for this? Susan and Daphne have a bet: fifty dollars are riding on Susan getting to bed with John before midterms*. Susan writes a steamy love letter to Richard, supposedly from Cathy, and posts it on the Tri Delt bulletin board. John sees this and doesn’t know what to think. Richard asks Cathy to a movie, and afterward starts macking on her. She slugs him, he shows her the letter, and he adds that two girls (Susan and Daphne, of course) told him Cathy was into him. When he describes them, she promises to get back at them. “For both of us.” But we never see him again, poor sod.
Cathy, Rachel and Amy organize a silent-treatment campaign against Susan and Daphne. (Nobody liked them to begin with, and they’re so self-absorbed it takes days for them to catch on.) The Tri Delts get brought in on it, and I have to admit, the one funny bit is when Susan calls John and he pretends never to have heard of “a chick named Radcliffe”. This culminates in a cafeteria food fight, after which all five have to appear before the Dean of Women, who comes off like a Girl Scout leader. No punishment for our three heroines, but Susan and Daphne have to make a public apology or they’ll get suspended. (Seriously? No penalty for the silent treatment nonsense? Never happen today.)
But what of John + Cathy, you might ask? Well, the night before the food fight, he accidentally-on-purpose encounters Cathy in the computer lab. SYNTAX ERROR SYNTAX ERROR…Man, am I glad those days are over. Anyway, he helps her with her program, then they go out for a coffee and have one of the most unnatural, stilted, poorly written conversations I have ever read; “After all” is said twice in the same paragraph. But at least it gets them walking home in the romantic moonlight and “Shut up and let me kiss you.”
When the dust settles, Cathy competes in her first track meet, wins one event, and realizes she just has to relax and be true to herself. Aw. Later, she encounters Susan, who apologizes for real. Cathy accepts, and thinks maybe someday they can be friends. Aw, again. Honestly, if you took out the smoking, drinking, cursing and sex references, the setting could be changed to middle school. (Actually, in some school districts, leaving that stuff in would be accurate.) Although Cathy does come off rather like a seventh grader. And other characters treat her that way. Amy and Rachel call her “Indiana”; Amy tells her she needs a keeper; Rachel says “You’re supposed to be making friends, remember?”
And the funny thing is, while Cathy is crying tears of joy after winning the half-mile, she thinks of John, Rachel, Amy and the track coach as “Friends [who] made winning possible.” But I don’t recall Cathy and Rachel hanging out together after this. From Amy’s POV, she considers Cathy a friend, though not a best friend, but she and Rachel don’t seem to have much use for each other. And Cathy and John are pretty much background characters after the second installment. It is interesting to see the different perspectives: someone can come off fairly well in one story and quite badly in another.
And on the last page, we get the lead-in to the next installment. Amy’s SO, who Cathy has heard a lot about, although we haven’t until now, is English and in a band. His bandmate wrote to Amy, telling her the band is coming to Boston. Squee! But…the bandmate, not the SO himself, is the one who wrote to her? Red flag, obvs. Stay tuned…
*Daphne won the bet by default, but I’m assuming that Susan never paid, so Daphne never got that Ralph Lauren shirt she was jonesing for.
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This is the only series that uses language. (At least in this book; I’ll have to check the others.) Several instances of “bitch” (Cathy struggles to say it in her mind, but she does say it) and at least one “shit” and one “damn”. And a “douchebags”. There’s a lot of smoking, mild sexual references, and people drink to the point of intoxication, but with only reasonable consequences (missing class the next day, feeling foolish). There’s also a reference to Rachel having a date with a guy who had “the distinct impression that ‘no’ meant ‘yes’,” and while she does get away, it’s at the expense of a torn blouse. The term “date rape” was just coming into common use then.
Continuity and other errors: Amy claims to have been in a Twisted Sister video. That’s heavy metal, not punk! Rachel lights “another cigarette” when there can’t have been time for her to finish the previous one. Rachel puts a name tag on Cathy’s blouse, and Cathy apparently transferred it to the t-shirt she changed into afterwards. Daphne is described as a redhead, but in later installments, she and Susan are both blonde. The movie Richard and Cathy go to is supposedly a midnight screening, but they’re showing two movies, and it’s not quite 2 am when it lets out.
There are more topical references in this than in the other two college series: designer jeans, M-TV (sic), Hall and Oates, Mad Max and The Road Warrior. And the ghosting of Susan and Daphne is described as “Bitch busters…who you gonna call?”
And one thing: Rachel calls Susan and Daphne “the Harpies”. Maybe I wasn’t so much more sophisticated than Cathy, because she didn’t ask what that meant, while I had to look it up.
We Were Series Once, and Young (Adult) 