"Life was hard. But a pouf? That should be easy."
Thus begins Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi's foray into the literary genre. Made famous on MTV's "Jersey Shore," Snooki captivated the world with her diminutive stature, her towering hairdos and her penchant for gorilla juiceheads. Having thoroughly exhausted the world of television, she attempts to broaden her horizons by venturing into the world of authorship. Her pioneer effort, "A Shore Thing," currently sits at number 24 on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Contrary to popular belief, "A Shore Thing" is not, in fact, an autobiography of forays at the Jersey Shore or otherwise. But the protagonist, Giovanna "Gia" Spumanti, does bear a striking similarity to the author in personality, interests and exploits. The premise of the novel is Gia's summer in Seaside Heights with her cousin, Isabella "Bella" Rizzoli. The two guidettes set out to accomplish the three D's: drinking, dancing and "duh": finding hot guidos with whom to bide their time.
Summer in Seaside Heights, however, is not all fun and games. The girls must work in order to be able to pay for their tequila shots, tanning sessions and mistakes. Gia gets a job at the Tantastic Tanning Salon and befriends Maria, a cougar with an inclination for doing body shots out of the belly buttons of rhinestone-clad guys half her age. Bella is hired at a gym by Tony "Trouble" Troublino, with whom she ultimately begins a romantic relationship.
Gia is not lacking in romantic pursuits either. She spends the first part of the book crashing and burning with the boyfriend of her high school nemesis, a hippie and roided-up juicehead whom she calls "Hulk." Some girls might be deterred by such trials and tribulations, but not Gia. As the narrator clearly states, "Gia loved penises. She couldn't go through life without them. If only penises weren't attached to their jerkoff hosts, the world would be a better place."
Gia eventually begins to see beyond the jerks and embarks on a real relationship with a local firefighter named Frankie. As she travels down the road of commitment, she shows everything she's learned along the way, dispensing romantic advice to the readers. "How hard could it be," she asks, "to show the person you loved that you cared? All you had to do was smush every chance you got and treat them with kindness and respect. Easy."
One other piece of advice she offers? Before a hot date, Gia applies strokes of dark blush to her cleavage, "to make her boobies look even bigger."
The plot of "A Shore Thing" is, as one might expect, filled with all sorts of holes and inconsistencies. There are two "preppies" from Connecticut, Bender and Ed, who take it upon themselves to play a manipulative game with the women of Seaside Heights and attempt to bed them without moral restrictions. Bella nearly falls victim to their creepy charms. Gia's former-friends-now-enemies from high school, Linda and Janey, wage an epic war on the two cousins, including but not limited to slipping laxatives into Jell-O shots and spray-tanning all sorts of insults onto each other's bodies. Clearly, these antagonistic characters are there to keep the plot twisting, but they are lackluster and uninspired.
A strong point of the novel is the sheer frequency and diversity of the metaphors and similes Snooki uses to convey her points. Linda and Janey compare Gia to a chronic sexually transmitted disease, returning to Seaside Heights at an inopportune time. When Gia and Frankie kiss for the first time, she "was like a stick of butter on a subway rail." When Bella and Gia get into a fight, their friendship "dissolved faster than Alka-Seltzer." These analogies serve to bolster an otherwise weak and unconvincing writing style, peppered with phrases like, "I'm not a dudette, I'm a guidette" and "Don't eat me, bitch."
Another definite shortcoming of the book lies in the poor copyediting. There are only so many times an educated reader can handle "your" instead of "you're." The poor proofreading skills, however, do provide some entertainment when, during an evening out, Bella is wearing a "red crotched bikini top." Or maybe that's not a typo at all.
Ultimately, "A Shore Thing" is a quick read and measures up nearly perfectly to what one should expect of a book both starring and written by a pickle-loving, tanning-addicted, dance-floor maniac who wears T-shirts with sayings like "Orgasm Donor" emblazoned across the front.
Snooki's fame as a successful author will be forever immortalized in the tweet announcing her achievement: "OMG I'm a New York Times Best Selling Author!!!"