My First Love and Other Disasters by francine pascal

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

3 1/2 Stars. Despite my annoyance with the protagonist, this turned out to be an okay book. Some of Victoria's thoughts and views really tickled me. The plot wasn't enthralling, but it was somewhat entertaining.

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Shaharar_Islam

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

So '70s, delightful. Francine Pascal is a bit of a genius. A fifteen-year-old girl becomes a mother's helper on Fire Island so she can capture a dreamy boy who turns out to be a predatory no-goodnik. The adults on Fire Island are selfish lushes cheating on each other who make their mothers helpers work too hard for too little money. That sounded accurate but some of the other depictions of Fire Island were not realistic. Oh, there's even a rescue at sea!

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TheEdguy

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

This was very enjoyable and defied neat happy endings in that low-key 'let's be realistic' YA way, like: so the dude you like is a shitty spoilt dude and the dude who likes you but whom you didn't find very exciting actually turns out to be funny and giving and nice, but! End of the book, you're both still just friends, just kicking it, and that's nice, and the nice dude never gets mentioned again because you're just friends. Which I think is a very valuable lesson for overwrought 15 year olds who read Francine Pascal, so good job there, hahaha.

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Faceorface

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I suddenly remembered the steamy scene in this book and now I'm thinking dayme. I don't remember the exact details but that making out scene was really good for young girls to read. Whenever Victoria was uncomfortable during the makeout scene, she would outright tell that dude to stop. I think she didn't allow that guy to make her feel guilty for not telling him touch her where he wanted and she stood firm. I accidentally learned something good while giggling over the one "sexy scene."

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adhi01

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I read this book more than once when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I liked this book because the main character was different than a lot of girls in romance books of that time. She made stupid decisions, she lied, she was unapologetic about trying to steal another girls boyfriend, had smoked pot and drank and it wasn't a big deal (most teens did during the time period the book was written. The late 70's). I remember my friends and I used to joke about one of the lines out of the book. ...and it wasn't his keys.

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surrendertsubaki

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I just enjoyed this a lot. Her books were my favorite YA when I was growing up. I just loved her characters. They were relatable and the situations that she put them in where realistic.

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Claimed_Dude

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

My first love and other disasters
By Francine Pascal

Victoria, now fifteen and having just finished her freshman year of high school, she is so startled and focused on getting her parents to allow her to take a job as a "Mother helper" to their glamorous divorced neighbor when she spends the summer on Fire Island because of her opportunity to ensnare her crush, the hunky new guy at school, Jim, who will be spending the summer there. But the situation is further complicated by the fact that Jim already has a girlfriend, Gloria. Now, Victoria try to find the way to get close to her first love Jim.

I really love this book because it is very entertaining, romantic, and also mature than what I thought of. Especially, I like the part where Victoria and her best friend Steffi went to the shoe store where Jim works, for the first mission to get close to him. But sadly, it turn out to be the most hysterically funny scene ever. Like in the book shows, "I absolutely cannot let him go back down to that cellar again for shoes I'm never going to put on once I take them out of the store. besides, he'll despise me forever if I do... You've got to picture Steffi still doubled over on the floor"(26). This scene made me hilarious and inspired me because it is funny to imagine Steffi is just lying in the floor watching Victoria is making out awfully bad and this is disaster for Victoria ever!

I recommend this book to the teenagers between 13 to 19 years old who like to read humor, comedy, and romentic book.

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Saighberyasi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

It was frustrating that the protagonist was brought up in a world thinking that people who disrespected her, especially in areas of consent, were right and fine to do so, and I worry for young people reading it that they might believe her in terms of what she thinks is true during those specific scenes. I know the whole point was that Jim was a jerk, but the characters never reflected on the fact that those moments were unhealthy and, truthfully, illegal. I can't stand when Teen Fiction does that.

It wasn't a total loss, though. There were some funny moments, relatable babysitting incidents, and Barry was killin' it (although he came off really strongly at first).

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Victoria Martin #2

My First Love and Other Disasters

francine pascal

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