A Match Made in High School

Title: A Match Made in High School
Author: Kristin Walker
Year Published: 2009
Publisher: Razorbill
Pages: 278
Price: USD 9.49 in The Book Depository

It was Fiona's senior year when her school's head master suddenly came up with the idea of holding a marriage ed class called Trying the Knot. All of the seniors must be fake married with spouses chosen randomly by the school for a year or they wouldn't get their diplomas. It was not like the seniors was forced do the "thing" that the married couple supposed to do, but it's more to learning how to work together to earn money and manage it, how to understand your spouse better, etc with the hope that in the future the number of divorce would be reduced.

It was a pretty great idea, if you were lucky enough to be given the right spouse. But Fiona knew that she had never had this thing called luck. And she had never predicted that her luck would be so bad until she knew that her match was this no-neck Neanderthal Todd Harding, whose girlfriend, the co-captain of cheerleader squad and also the mean girl Amanda, was paired with Fiona's eternal crush, the cute Gabe Webber.

Being in a mission together with Todd Harding brought so many troubles to Fiona as Todd seemed like never waste his every opportunity to offend her and Amanda seemed to hate her more because of her closeness with Todd. Meanwhile, all Fiona wanted was to get closer to Gabe, who seemed like didn't care of Fiona at all.

How would this program gonna end? Would Fiona survive? Was she really so unlucky at all?


This book is hilarious! O God, I laughed so hard when I read it. The idea about the fake marriage class in high school is crazy but the implementation is way crazier. I don't know how Kristin Walker got the idea but the story is so fresh and unpredictable and I enjoyed every pages I read until the end.

Yes it IS unpredictable. More than once I was surprised by how the story turned. At first, I thought this would be another cat vs dog story and well.. maybe it would be ended with the cat and dog fallen in love with each other. But hey, guess what, this story has way more than that and it surely has things that the readers can learn.

Kristin Walker did a very good job in voicing Fiona. Fiona was a kind of person who didn't really care about what happened in her surroundings. She didn't bother other people's judgment of her and kept doing what she felt right. At first, being Fiona seemed so free and burdenless but then we knew that not all people liked what Fiona did. Todd, on the other hand, was a boy who, from Fiona's perspective, looked like a jerk at first. His first appearance didn't leave good impression but as the story moved, I slowly fell in love with his personality. I love both the main characters.

And now, move to the supporting characters.. So, there are Marcie -- Fiona's best friend, Johnny Mercer -- the goofy boy who was also Marcie's fake husband, and Amanda -- the cheerleader from hell who also happened to be Todd's girlfriend. Well, actually there are more but I don't think I can discuss them all here. In my opinion, Kristin Walker also did a great job in making them alive. Every character had their own unique personality and felt so real with their own problems and anxieties. Reading them interacting in this book and also the whole story really made me feel like I was in high school once again.

Overall, A Match Made in High School is a book that successfully makes me remember my high school years and.. well, gave me a lot of laugh when I read it. It was very entertaining and so fresh. I will highly recommend this one.

Aaand... before I end this review, let me tell you one of my favorite quote from this book:

"I guess what I'm trying to say is, you just can't tell who you're going to end up with. You might spend your whole life dreaming about one type of person, only to find happiness with somebody completely different. Someone you figured you had nothing in common with just might turn out to be your dream guy. And you know he's your dream guy because you become a better person. He brings out all these great things in you that you never knew or believed were there. And if you're really lucky, you do the same for him."