Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything » (Unabridged)

E. Lockhart is the author of The Boyfriend List, Fly on the Wall, and The Boy Book. She once portrayed both Peter Quince and a tree in a drama school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, wearing an electric-blue unitard. Her theatrical career ended soon after.

At the Manhattan High School for the Arts, where everyone is "different" and everyone is "special," Gretchen Yee feels ordinary. She's the kind of girl who sits alone at lunch, drawing pictures of Spider-Man, so that she won't have to talk to anyone; who has a crush on Titus but won't do anything about it; who has no one to hang out with when her best (and only real) friend, Katya, is busy. One day, Gretchen wishes that she could be a fly on the wall in the boys' locker room just to learn more about guys. What are they really like? What do they really talk about? Are they really cretins most of the time'Fly on the Wall is the story of how that wish comes true.

Publishers Weekly

Narrator Gretchen Yee will grab readers from the first page with her snappy commentary. Even at her Manhattan arts high school, she's a misfit. But the comic-book obsessed artist gets an unexpected chance to live as an alter ego when, for a week, she turns into a literal fly on the wall, trapped inside the boys' locker room. Lockhart (The Boyfriend List) sets up a clever parallel by making Gretchen's class read The Metamorphosis, and-like Kafka's protagonist-it is unclear what caused Gretchen's change (she suspects a philosophical old man she met on the subway, or a strange soda she drank on the way to school, among other things). Her sense of humor offsets her generally negative outlook, and the pace picks up during her time as a fly. As Gretchen buzzes around hundreds of naked bodies, she witnesses a lot of locker room drama, and worries about the morality of spying even as she categorizes their bums or describes an uncircumcised penis. She also realizes how insecure boys can be (she even learns that confidence is not always what makes someone sexy-sometimes, as in the case of her crush-its just the opposite). The conclusion wraps a bit neatly (and without much introspection), but readers will find enough thoughtful material here to keep buzzing through the pages. Ages 12-up. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.