Shut Out

Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part, Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention 

Then Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: She and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. But what Lissa never sees coming is her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling... (from Goodreads)

This was a fast-paced, light, easy read, a welcome change from the dark paranormal that makes up most of YA today. It was pretty good, mostly what I'd expect in chick lit: the plot wasn't all that original, but the characters made up for that.

Lissa was a good narrator. I liked how she was focused and didn't let anything get in her way. At some points she took things a bit too seriously, but this was balanced out once she saw the error of her ways and fixed it. I also thought her obsession with time was funny; it was a quirk that balanced her out as a character. The only thing I didn't like about her was at the end of the book, she does something totally out-of-character. I understand the event was necessary for the plot, but it was really out of character, like she went from being on the heads side of a coin to the tails side. I felt the transition should have been a little smoother.

As I said before, the plot was pretty standard for a general fiction/romance book like this one. Nothing bad happened, but then nothing really surprising happened, except for the already-mentioned event with Lissa's character. Who Lissa ended up with was, of course, no surprise at all. 

Shut Out was pretty good, if a little standard.