Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson

When the math teacher disappears with the funds just eleven days before the dance, determined and organized Nat goes into high gear to find alternative ways to make the prom happen and drags an unwilling Ashley into the flurry of urgent details.
Ashley has enough problems in her life already, starting with the complexities of her crowded but loving working class family -- her extremely pregnant mother and her three exuberant and prom-crazy aunts, and her cab-driving father and three younger brothers, who think nothing of happily trashing the kitchen in a game of hot dog baseball. Then there’s Mr. Gilroy, the evil vice principal of discipline, who has Ashley on endless detention, her awful job at EZ-CHEEZ-E, where she has trouble seeing the customers through the eyeholes of her rat costume, and her good-looking but lowlife boyfriend TJ, who wants her to join him in a future as depressing as the dank one-room apartment he has so proudly rented for them. Not to speak of Nat’s loony grandmother, who wears her red bathing cap even when she’s not doing the backstroke in a wading pool, babbles at Ashley in Russian, and spits on the floor to show her disapproval.

After I read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, I knew that I would more than likely enjoy Prom. The content is not as dark as the first which is something that I enjoyed. It was a light hearted book about a teenager who hates prom. Ashley has a boyfriend who seems to have a one track mind and wants to have Ashley all to himself. Her parents are horndogs which is so well described as a teenager would describe it that I felt like a teenager had written this book. There were a lot of little points throughout the book that made me laugh because of how everything was written. The characters (except for Ashley's boyfriend) all have a quality that I liked and it made you root for every single one of them. There is heart in this book even though you believe Ashley doesn't care about most of the stuff going on. She hates her job, she obviously does not care about school in the beginning, and just wants to get out of there. Trying to save prom changes her character in a way that is for the better. She becomes more motivated and sees the light about a lot of issues. I quite enjoyed this book and I would recommend the book for the older tweens due to a little bit of adult content. It is also a quick read so it is one that tweens can easily breeze through.