Initially I scored the writing a 3, but going over what I thought of it I’ve decided a 2 to be more fitting. The four most popular girls in school, who are obviously all going to prom, one even with a college guy! They don’t need prom! They don’t need anything! As long as they have each other… What makes this harder on our poor girls is that Margaret’s mother owns and runs their small town’s premier purveyor of prom dresses, where Margaret and best friend Caroline are cruelly suffered to work after school, helping their luckier classmates find that perfect dress.īut don’t feel too sorry for them, they always spend prom night together, all four of them, and they have the best time. Margaret and her friends have never been to prom, despite being seniors, and they are probably not going this year. One set are that pretty-in-a-plain-way staple of our genre, from which we draw our heroine Margaret. What is quite neat about how the tale proceeds, is that in the main narrative Diane provides us with two groups of four best girl-friends:

And if that isn’t an immediate clue that by the end of the book some friendships are probably going to be burnt to a crisp, well, are you new to this? We begin with a group of four 12 year old girls, best friends, making a blood-oath at a beach bonfire to be friends forever. But the perfect level of silly and shambolic for my hazy case of Sunday-head. Prom Date is the perfect choice for just such a Sunday. Sometimes, on a lazy Sunday, when your brain is a little bit hungover from all the flashing lights and bright colours of the Eurovision Song Contest, you need to lay on the sofa and read a Point Horror while someone feeds you coffee and pancakes.

Prom Date by Diane Hoh