Review: Real Live Boyfriends: Yes. Boyfriends, plural. If my life weren't complicated, I wouldn't be Ruby Oliver (Ruby Oliver, #4) by E. Lockhart

Rating (Out of 5): 3.5

Publisher: Random House (Delacorte Press)

Spoilers: Very Minor

Goodreads Synopsis:

 Ruby Oliver, the neurotic, hyperverbal heroine of the The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, and The Treasure Map of Boys, is back!

Ruby Oliver is in love. Or it would be love, if Noel, her real live boyfriend, would call her back. But Noel seems to have turned into a pod-robot lobotomy patient, and Ruby can’t figure out why.

Not only is her romantic life a shambles:
Her dad is eating nothing but Cheetos,
Her mother’s got a piglet head in the refrigerator,
Hutch has gone to Paris to play baguette air guitar,
Gideon shows up shirtless,
And the pygmy goat Robespierre is no help whatsoever.

Will Ruby ever control her panic attacks?
Will she ever understand boys?
Will she ever stop making lists?
(No to that last one.)

Roo has lost most of her friends. She’s lost her true love, more than once. She’s lost her grandmother, her job, her reputation, and possibly her mind. But she’s never lost her sense of humor. The Ruby Oliver books are the record of her survival.

Review:

This was pretty good. It's been a while since I read the last one, so I was thinking I should re-read them, but it sums things up pretty easily within the book, so it wasn't hard to remember what had previously happened.

This series is, pretty shamelessly, a drama-filled, teenager-y, girl read. It's fun, and pretty light, and easy. And it's just generally good.

Ruby (or Roo, as her friends call her) is witty and over-thinks everything, and is boy-obsessed, even though she has terrible luck with them, and has a special love for sweets and girl-y lingo and giving people fun notes. She has panic attacks and sees a therapist because of it. And she tends to try to ignore things and be subtle about them instead of face them and be blunt, which is what she should be (this was a bit frustrating at times, actually). Her mother is always trying something new and becoming obsessed with it and never listens to anything Roo or her father says. At times, it's funny, but it's ridiculous how much she doesn't seem to care how her daughter or husband feels. And then her father gets depressed in this book, which is understandable but a little crazy (and, yea, funny).

In this book, Roo continues having problems with her friends and boys. I think that her friends are a little lame. Or, her old friends are lame. Meghan is pretty cool, even if she's a little oblivious, especially when it comes to love. Although, her outlook on it is also a little uplifting. I really like Finn, he's the sweet, good-boy type, and they are cute together. Hutch, with his music obsession and general odd-ness, is awesome, even if we didn't get to see much of him in this book since he's away in Paris.

Nora redeemed herself a little, but what she did before, and her timing, was very not cool of her. And Kim and Cricket, her old friends, made me dislike them even more. But I don't think what happened at the beginning of the series was all Roo's fault, and it's just totally lame that they all ruined their friendship over a boy. The whole situation was messy and immature.

That's one problem that I had with this book. They all seemed a little too immature for seniors. They might not be too far off, but still just a little. They acted a little more like freshmen or sophomore's or something. (But I could be wrong, since the immaturity of high schoolers astounds me sometimes.) Also, they 'fall in love' way too easily. All of them do.

The one part of the book that shows that they are all seniors, is that they are thinking about college. Roo doesn't dwell on it much, as she already has an idea of what she likes and where she wants to go. (Although I wondered how exactly she was supposed to pay for the schools that she mentioned, since they are out of state for her, expensive, and she's on scholarship. I guess that part of how? It doesn't really expand on this, explain it, but I guess that wasn't really a big part of this book. But still.) She does work on the video she wants to send to the colleges though, since she wants to be a filmmaker. This part of the book was fun, as I liked reading the little conversations as she taped them and questioned them about certain things. Like those, I also like Roo's lists (which don't always seem to have a list-like feel to them, but are still fun) and notes at the bottom of the page (especially these. They are actually, possibly my favorite part of this series).

The boy that Roo is having some problems with in this book (not really unlike the previous ones), is Noel. Noel has asthma that he ignores (which I totally relate to), and he's baked her cookies, and he obviously likes her, and he wants all of her updates. He's supposedly her Real Live Boyfriend (which she explains in the book), only then he starts not really acting the part, which makes her insecure and wonder and panic. And then some stuff happens with Gideon (who is Nora's older brother). Gideon is nice and in college, and I actually like him, but Roo keeps thinking about Noel, and her and Gideon just don't seem to connect the way they should. And then we find some stuff out about Noel, which explains the way he's been acting. (And [Spoiler!] the ending was pretty good, which was nice.)

This was pretty good. I believe it's the last in the series, which I didn't know until I read a review of it, and I guess I'm glad it is. If it was much, or any, longer, then it would seem even more dragged out with drama than it already is. It was good, but, you know... drama can seem to go on way too long. This series wasn't too bad with that, though, which is good. It was mostly a fun and easy book to read, which is what I needed at the time.