“Heaven is Paved With Oreos” by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

I wanted to like this book -- I did.  I had heard good things about Murdock’s writing and liked the premise … a girl is surprised by a summer trip to Rome with her wild and crazy Grandma.  Unfortunately, the book kept stumbling on me.  First and foremost, there is the main character, Sarah, who is supposed to be 14 but comes off as much, much younger.  The overwhelming innocence might play if this was 1970, and the girl was a very sheltered 12, but it just seems unrealistic that any 14 year-old (at least the ones I deal with on a day-to-day basis) would be this clueless.  Not to mention, she’s a fan of Oreos but has never heard of “Cookies and Cream” ice cream?  Maybe I’m just too much of a city girl.  So, that was issue #1.  The second tripping point for me was the Rome section.  It read like an encyclopedic travelogue.  I bought the part about pizza being “ucky” (cuz it has a fried egg in the middle) but the church descriptions sounded like they were lifted from “boring European History 101.”  Then, there is this “blank” that occurs near the end of the Rome trip.  It’s left oblique – Sarah is “too stressed” to even think about it, so we, as the readers, are left out of important knowledge.  When the big reveal happens at home afterwards it feels anticlimactic … not only was I not surprised, but the great mystery wasn’t really a big deal.  The ending … overly sweet and hugely predictable, held no “release” for me as a reader because it didn’t feel like something large had really happened in the book.  Told in diary form, the entire thing felt dated and had little page-turning appeal.  Murdock clearly wanted this to be a contemporary setting, but I can’t help feel that this is yet another semi-autobiographical tale dressed up as fiction.  Some, like Meg Medina, pulled that off well.  Others, like Jack Gantos and, apparently, Catherine Murdock, not so much.  While the characters had some potential the plot didn’t help them be that interesting.  This one is kind of a companion novel to the “Dairy Queen Trilogy” which includes some of the adjacent characters, but I can’t say, at this point, that I’m hot to read them.  Next, please.