Rainbow Party

Paul Ruditis

If there are places that actually come up with things like lists of the ten most controversial books in any year, when we look forward to January 2006, take any of those lists that doesn't have Paul Ruditis' Rainbow Party in the top spot with a grain, or preferably a lick, of salt. Rainbow Party has the distinction of being challenged in school libraries even before its release. It was mindlessly attacked from all sides simply on the basis of its subject matter, culminating in a scathing article by conservative mouthpiece Michelle Malkin in Jewish World Review that makes Rainbow Party sound rather like the second coming (no pun intended) of Satan himself. (Warning: the article does contain a major spoiler.) "Concerned parents" whipped up by this assemblage of meaningless rhetoric immediately began assaulting Amazon's review feature, posting such amusing one-liners as "A parent that buys this for a child should be jailed." (May 25, 2005) and "What sort of adult writes explicit novels about the sex lives of fourteen-year-olds?" (May 26) All one really needs to know about why these characters are "concerned" can be summed up in the beginning of a June 1 review: "There are several groups of people to blame for this book. *Godless * Liberals..." At this point, you should know more than enough to just toss them out with the trash.

Hopefully, you are one of those not shocked by the idea that high school students do, in fact, knock boots, get jiggy with it, hit that, or whatever your favorite offensive phrase of the day is regarding the activity in question. (And that such behavior has been going on for a lot longer than people have been writing books about it, else it's a pretty good bet none of us would be here having this "debate.") If you are, by all means, just stop reading here. You're obviously never going to read this book. If you still want to go out and protest it, by all means, be my guest. While you're doing so, maybe you want to take a mental look back at your own high school class and see what a hypocrite you're being.

Now that we've gotten rid of the boneheads, we can get on with this. The real question is, how's the book? Well, it's roughly what one would expect from a guy who's made his living previously writing TV show novelizations (Ruditis' name has appeared on novelizations from such grand television fare as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and what may have been the pinnacle of his career until now, The Brady Bunch). If you've always had your characterization done for you, you're probably not going to be that good at it. Such is the case here. Ruditis presents us with a number of walking, talking pieces of cardboard, and his efforts at deeper characterization are so transparent as to be laughable. Then he puts them into the usual situations; aside from the main theme of the book, I doubt there's much in here in the way of what these kids are doing or thinking than you'd find in a Sweet Valley High book, with a little gratuitous profanity tossed in. (While I promised myself I'd stop snipping at the mindless boneheads who tossed out one-liners for this one, I can't help but giggle like a girl at the reviewer who actually used the phrase "the eff word" and expected anyone to take him seriously.) There's a good deal of teen angst over whether they're getting into relationships, getting out of relationships, ever going to have relationships, that sort of thing. And you've got your supporting cast, which consists of The Oversheltering Parents, The Buffoonish Principal, and The Teacher With A Heart Of Gold Who Gets Disciplined By The School Board. Okay, how many teen books have you seen these characters in? Keep your hand raised if the number is over an hundred. Thank you, you may all now put your hands down.

Now, a book with no characterization and little plot can be salvaged one of two ways-- either if you get to wallow in a good deal of explicit and well-written sex, or if the writer's got enough panache to make a telephone book readable. (Note to self: contact the Yellow Book people and have them hire Cormac McCarthy.) Ruditis offers, well, neither. I promised myself I'd review this without any major spoilers, and I'm kind of treading the line, but I don't think this is one: there is a grand total of one (two, if you want to argue semantics-- one chapter begins just as one sex scene ends) sex scene in Rainbow Party, and to be blunt, I've read Victorian literature that's far more explicit. As for panache, well, the cookie-cutter characterization should tell you all you need to know about that.

Rainbow Party reads like a train wreck where no one actually got hurt-- it's kind of fun trying to look through the smoke to see what the fire is that's got everyone all hot under the collar, but by the time you've finished the book, you've found little other than a wet blanket that's not even smoldering all that much. The one good thing about all this is that Malkin's article and the scattershot one-liners of her posse are likely to get teens reading this book; however, I wish she'd picked on something of some literary merit.