Hot Dog Girl

Hot Dog Girl

By Jennifer Dugan

Elouise (Lou) Parker is determined to have the absolute best, most impossibly epic summer of her life. There are just a few things standing in her way:

  *  She's landed a job at Magic Castle Playland . . . as a giant dancing hot dog.

  *  Her crush, the dreamy Diving Pirate Nick, already has a girlfriend, who is literally the Princess of the park. But Lou's never liked anyone, guy or otherwise, this much before, and now she wants a chance at her own happily ever after.

  *  Her best friend, Seeley, the carousel operator, who's always been up for anything, suddenly isn't when it comes to Lou's quest to set her up with the perfect girl or Lou's scheme to get close to Nick.

  *  And it turns out that this will be their last summer at Magic Castle Playland--ever--unless she can find a way to stop it from closing.

I'm doing this one out of order, because the prompt is seasonal, and I figured why not squeeze the review in seasonally too?

So although I didn't love Hot Dog Girl, I am allowing myself to be charmed by it, and I will not be too harsh.  I mean, it's just a light summer read about a girl learning about falling in love, treating your friends right, not being down on yourself all the time, and becoming a little more grown up and mature.  Not like, real mature though, the book ends in a bake sale after all, but it's a cute enough story, done with a light hand.

I gravitated towards it because I love hot dogs and wanted a book for summer that was really about summer - summer as you always remember it fondly years later with endless days and warm nights when you're able to roam the town. Mosquito bites and shorts and beaches and the smell of sun screen and bug spray and the feeling of freedom.  Adult books about summer are mostly about indiscretions on Cape Cod during a rich people get-together or "finding yourself" in a new place after your husband divorces you.  Not quite the same thing.  Summer is my favorite season, but summer as a child, not summer as an adult, where you still have work in over air-conditioned offices, and only get brief tastes of the freedom you used to feel. Although you do occasionally get to participate in hot-dog eating contests, so it's not all disappointment as an adult.

Anyway, Hot Dog Girl does have that same nostalgic sense of summer freedom and loss, in this case because the fun park she's working at is going to close, which is nicely obvious metaphor for the closing of that period in your life where you can still go home again. Everything moves on!  You grow up and visit the old haunts and realize the water slide has become a parking lot for a pharmaceutical company and you just have to deal with it.  Or like in Grosse Pointe Blank, when your home has become an Ultimart. "You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there."

Lou is a fictional character and also only like, seventeen, so the fact that she doesn't realize that her bonkers plan to fake date her best friend to get closer to this guy she has a crush on is going to end in her realizing she's actually in love with her best friend is more forgiveable.  I suppose she doesn't have access to tv tropes like the rest of us.  Or like, to Can't Buy Me Love and To All The Boys I've Loved Before.  I was so-so on this part.  It was pretty telegraphed what was going to happen, but Nick (her crush) turns out to be nice and into her, and I felt kind of bad at the end when he winds up telling her that he moved to town to get away from bullies and then he ends up alone, after both his girlfriend and his crush find new partners.  Seeley, Lou's best friend, has a more limited arc, since her role is mainly to be the ever-patient friend who's been in love with Lou forever and puts up with her shenanigans. 

But like I said, it's all done with a light enough hand, and Lou never becomes so annoying with her antics that you end up rooting against her.  They all re-partner, they don't save the park, but they raise money for the owner's sick granddaughter, and much lessons are learned about meddling, self-confidence, and friendship.  The parts about Lou's mother leaving are well done, and the mental image of her in a hot dog costume is never not funny. More hot dogs, is what I say!

44: Read A Book During The Season It Is Set In