The Cheer Leader by Jill McCorkle

On Christmas this book was under the tree with my pile of presents. Like the title of this blog tells you, the name of this book is The Cheer Leader by Jill McCorkle. I'd never heard of this book ever before, but one night I picked it up and read it at like 1:00 in the morning because I couldn't fall asleep. I got about twenty pages into it.

The narrator never says this, but she's looking at pictures. Each date represents a different picture and she tells the reader a story about each one. So that is how we I guess get acquainted with the narrator, it's how she reels us in, by looking through these pictures.

I believe that her mother is dead or has run away, because there is a picture of her mother that is yellow and fading and stashed away by her father, it's the picture that she starts the book off with. The narrator is always very nostalgic about her mother.

Each picture that the narrator, Jo Spencer talks about has it's own story behind it. We all here the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, Jo might not make a thousand words for every picture, but she's at least got something to say.

My favourite story so far is about a picture that her brother took of her and her friend Jeff Johnson who had come down to visit his aunt and Jo's neighbor. Jo's brother Bobby teases her saying that Jeff is her boyfriend before he snaps the picture. It seems that Jo will never forget that about Jeff even though she was 11 before that picture was taken on their way to get slushies from the Quick Stop even though he left that summer and never dropped her a line.

It's an interesting story so far... but I read it late one night and have kinda forgotten exactly how far I've gotten, but I'm planning to revisit it soon.