Let start out by saying that I ended up taking a much longer break between reading and reviewing First Time (Ian’s Story) and reading and reviewing First Time (Penny’s Story) than I was originally planning to. One thing that I neglected to mention in my review for First Time(Ian’s Story) is that I received an advanced copy of both First Time (Ian’s Story) and First Time (Penny’s Story) from Abigail Barnette so I could review them for my blog. Because I had received an advanced copy of both versions of First Time, I was originally going to review them back-to-back. However, as I was reading “Ian’s Story”, I decided that it would be a good idea to read and review at least one other book before I read this story, so I read and reviewed The Bourbon Kings by J.R. Ward. One thing led to another and I ended up going on to review Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined by Stephenie Meyer, and The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.
Anyway, here I am now. I’ve finally read First Time (Penny’s Story), and I have to say that I’m actually really glad that I waited a while and read several other books before I read First Time (Penny’s Story). As weird as this might sound, I think that reading several other books after I read First Time (Ian’s Story) and before I even started reading First Time (Penny’s Story) actually helped me to enjoy this book more than I probably would have if I had read First Time (Ian’s Story). Part of me was afraid that I would end up feeling a sense of reader’s fatigue if I read “Ian’s Story” and “Penny’s Story back-to-back since they’re essentially the same story, only told from two different points of view. That’s the main reason I decided to read and review several other books before I read “Penny’s Story”. I especially think that reading Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined in particular really helped me to enjoy this book more and also really caused me to think about this book in a different way than I probably would have if I had read it sooner. I say this because I think that Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined and First Time (Penny’s Story) are similar to each other in the sense that they are a retelling of sorts of a different book that their respective authors wrote. Although, it’s a somewhat different situation with First Time since Abigail Barnette released both “Ian’s Story” and “Penny’s Story” at the same time. Reading Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined really got me thinking about what I as a reader would and wouldn’t want to see if a writer wrote and published multiple versions of the same story. That being said here are my thoughts on First Time (Penny’s Story).
Right off the bat, I have to say that while I absolutely loved “Ian’s Story” and thought that it was perhaps the best romance novel that I’ve read years, I ended up having extremely mixed feelings about “Penny’s Story”. While “Ian’s Story” really sucked me in and made me want to read large amounts of the book each time I sat down to read it, “Penny’s Story” was really hard for me to get through. Reading it constantly felt more like a chore to me than something that I actually enjoyed doing. For a large chunk of the book, I found myself constantly wanting to read the other books that I’m reading at the moment (A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin and The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert) instead of reading this book. Honestly, if I hadn’t requested an advanced copy of both versions of First Time so I could review them for my blog, I’m not sure that I would have bothered to finish reading “Penny’s Story”.
For the record, I don’t want to spend this entire review criticizing First Time (Penny’s Story), because there are definitely some good things to say about it. For starters, if you read my review of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, one of my biggest complaints about that book was that I felt like Stephenie Meyer wasn’t really offering people anything truly new with that book. With the exception of roughly the last two chapters of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, it felt like a note-for-note copy and paste of Twilight, only with the genders of almost all the characters swapped and not much else was changed. If you ask me, a lot of Bella and Edward’s actions in Twilight simply didn’t translate very well once the gender of the characters had been changed.
Stephenie Meyer by her own admission said that she wrote Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined very quickly, and I feel like it really showed in the overall quality of the writing. Sure, I think it was nice that Meyer wanted to do something special for the tenth anniversary edition of Twilight, but I still think Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined ended up coming across as a lazy cash grab, especially when you consider the fact that the only way you can buy Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined is to buy the tenth anniversary edition of Twilight. I’m guessing most of the people who would be interested in reading Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined probably already own a copy of Twilight, so it’s pretty frustrating that people basically have to buy a book that they already own just to buy a copy of Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, but I digress
One of the reasons I’m mentioning Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined in this review is because that book honestly made me very weary of writers publishing multiple versions of the same story. After reading that book, a part of me was left wondering what a writer’s motivation would truly be for writing multiple versions of the same story. Are they doing it simply to make money while also being too lazy to come up with a whole new idea for a book, or are they doing that because they feel like they have something new to offer people by writing a retelling or a reimagining of a book that they had previously published? I suppose that either of those possible scenarios could be a writer’s motives for writing books that are a retelling or a reimagining, but I do think that’s something to think about and possibly discuss with other people who love to read.
That being said, despite the fact that I think “Penny’s Story” has a lot of problems, it’s pretty clear to me that Barnette put a lot of time and effort into writing both “Ian’s Story” and “Penny’s Story” for First Time. While it’s technically true that it’s basically the same story written from two different characters’ (Ian’s and Penny’s) points of view, they both offer the reader something unique and different in terms of the insight they offer in regards to Ian and Penny as characters and the story itself. After reading both versions of First Time, I can honestly say that neither “Ian’s Story” nor “Penny’s Story” feels like a complete copy and paste of the story. They both feature plenty of scenes that aren’t in the other versions of the story, which makes sense since Ian and Penny thankfully aren’t together 24/7, and they have plenty of things going on in their lives aside from just their relationship. Plus, there are characters in “Penny’s Story” that weren’t really featured in “Ian’s Story” very much, if at all, so that also provided the reader with some new material and insight for the story.
As I said in my review for “Ian’s Story”, this is the first book written by Jenny Trout/Abigail Barnette that I’ve read. Until I read First Time, I had only read her chapter recaps of the Fifty Shades books by E.L. James, and her other blog posts on her website. I honestly didn’t know that Sophie (Penny’s boss) is apparently the protagonist of Barnette’s Boss series until I read some of the reviews that other people had written for “Penny’s Story” on Amazon. Plus, Ian is also featured in the Boss series, so I guess that the By The Numbers series could in a sense be considered a spinoff of that book series. I was already planning on reading at least the first book in the Boss series, which is The Boss, after reading “Ian’s Story” since I loved it so much, but knowing that Sophie is one of the main characters in that book series makes me want to read The Boss even more. I’ll explain why in a little bit, but Sophie was definitely one of my favorite things about “Penny’s Story”.
If I had to say what I think the biggest problem that “Penny’s Story” has is that Penny constantly comes across as being incredibly annoying and immature throughout the story. As I said in my review for “Ian’s Story”, the only times that I thought about giving it a score lower than a 10 out of 10 were all pretty much when I was reading parts of the story where Penny was acting especially annoying and immature. However, since First Time is a unique situation where Barnette released both versions of the story simultaneously, I decided to cut “Ian’s Story” some slack, and I still gave it a 10 out of 10.
That being said, when I was reading the moments in Ian and Penny’s relationship where I had found her annoying in “Ian’s Story” from Penny’s point of view, I usually ended up thinking that she came across as being even more annoying and immature than I thought she was at times in “Ian’s Story”. Plus, there were a lot of other times where I felt that she was acting extremely annoying and immature throughout “Penny’s Story”. For example, Penny’s reaction to Ian initially ordering warm octopus eschubeshe at the beginning of their first date really annoyed me in “Ian’s Story” since it was the beginning of their date, and they hadn’t really had a chance to talk yet, so Ian had no way of knowing how passionate Penny was about octopods. However, the following excerpt from the book that features Penny’s reaction to him doing that from her point of view is just way too over the top crazy for me given what she was thinking in that particular moment.
Of all the characteristics that define me as a person, the one that I truly believe will be mentioned not only in my obituary, but my eulogy and the engraving on my headstone, is my unwavering passion for octopods. They’re one of the most intelligent, if not the most intelligent, invertebrate. They can solve puzzles and navigate mazes. They’re incredible escape artists. Of all the creatures in the sea, they are by far my favorite. Actually, of all the creatures on the planet. I’d take a pet octopus over a pet dog any day, if they lived more than a few years in captivity.So, when this previously charming stranger announced his intention to eat one, every instinct I had was to flip the table and shout, “No!” at him like he was a puppy who’d gotten into the trash.Instead, I made a high-pitched noise that was completely out of my control.
(Barnette pg. 10)
I get that Penny loves octopods and that they’re her favorite animal, but she really needs to realize that they’re eating dinner at a restaurant that apparently specializes in making sea food cuisine, and not everybody else on the planet is as batshit crazily passionate about octopods as she is. She really shouldn’t even be thinking about going on an angry rampage simply because somebody orders a dish that features octopods as the main ingredient.
When I was reading “Ian’s Story”, it was clear to me that Brad had hurt Penny very badly by treating her the way he did. However, reading the story from Penny’s point of view really left me thinking that she’s definitely still not over Brad and he really hurt her very deeply, so Ian’s outburst about him not being Brad during the fight that they had when they broke up made a little bit for sense to me. There were quite a few times throughout “Penny’s Story” where I felt like she really shouldn’t be dating Ian or any guy at this particular point in her life until she’s truly over Brad and has worked through all of her trust issues given how quick she is to assume the worst about Ian. When I was reading the part of the story where Penny goes to the restaurant to give Rosa’s girlfriend, Amanda, her wrist brace, Penny’s entire reaction, both internally and externally, to seeing Ian at the restaurant with his friend, Carrie, and immediately assuming that he was having an affair with her and that they were on a date really pissed me off.
I felt like she was kind of channeling Christian Grey in that moment since Ian and Carrie were at the restaurant having a perfectly innocent business meeting, and they weren’t doing anything even remotely romantic when she saw them. They were just talking, but the way Penny reacted in that moment makes her come across as being someone who thinks that the person they’re dating shouldn’t be allowed to talk to anybody of the opposite gender. Plus, she later got all bent out of shape when she saw Ian and Annie each smoking a cigarette. It’s moments like that that really left me wondering why Ian was willing to put up with Penny’s crap instead of just dumping her. Back when I was reading “Ian’s Story”, I was really hoping that reading “Penny’s Story” would make me feel more understanding and sympathetic towards Penny in both of those particular moments, but instead Penny just pissed me off even more. Penny really seems to a have a tendency to assume the worst about Ian, and she repeatedly fabricates a conflict between them, which really diminished my enjoyment of “Penny’s Story”.
In some ways reading “Penny’s Story” reminds me of how reading Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian made me feel differently about various parts of Fifty Shades of Grey once I read them from Christian’s point of view. For example, I didn’t really have any sympathy for Ana when she was going on and on about how embarrassed she was about asking Christian if he was gay when she interviewed him for her college’s newspaper. I also felt like Kate had been completely out of line for planning to ask Christian if he was gay in the first place. However, reading Christian’s internal reaction to Ana asking him whether or not he was gay really made me lose pretty much any sympathy that I had for him at that moment since he was thinking about basically raping her right then and there just to prove to Ana that he wasn’t gay. It’s definitely not a good idea for a writer to have a character react to a situation like that the way Christian did in the opening pages of the book unless they want the reader to hate that character, but I digress.
One thing that I felt that Barnette handled really well in “Ian’s Story”, but really dropped the ball on in “Penny’s Story” was the way she portrayed Penny’s superstitious nature and the significance of what the message in Ian’s fortune cookie from their first date said throughout the book. In “Ian’s Story”, I felt like Barnette did a great job of emphasizing the importance of those aspects of the story and who Penny is as a character without beating the reader over the head with them. I also found Penny’s superstitious nature to be kind of endearing when I was reading “Ian’s Story”, especially when it came to Penny’s views on fortune cookies. However, when it comes to how Barnette portrayed all of that in “Penny’s Story”, I feel like Barnette really seemed to overemphasize Penny’s superstitious nature to the point where I felt like she was beating the reader over the head with it so much that I’m kind of surprised that I didn’t end up getting a concussion from reading this book. Given the fact that this is Penny’s version of the story, and she’s the one who’s truly superstitious and really believes in following advice that’s given in fortune cookies and other stuff like numerology, it kind of makes sense that Barnette would emphasize that aspect of Penny as a character more in this story. However, I honestly think that “Penny’s Story” would have been a lot better if Barnette had downplayed Penny’s superstitious tendencies a lot more than she did.
The fact that Penny actually believed that there was a family curse that had the power to affect her life if she had sex with a guy who she didn’t think was her true love made her come across as being incredibly naïve and stupid, if you ask me. Barnette didn’t really specify how old Penny was when her parents originally told her about the so-called “family curse”, but I’m guessing that we’re supposed to think that they told her that when she was a teenager. It’s one thing for her to have actually believed her parents when they told her that there was a family curse and she was a teenager; it’s a whole other thing for her to still believe that when she’s twenty-two and only finally start to question whether or not her parents were being honest with her when she’s an adult.
Personally, I don’t think a person should have sex with somebody if they don’t want to, especially if it would be the first time that they ever have sex. However, I feel like Penny held onto her virginity for an extremely stupid reason. As horrible of a person as Brad turned out to be, and even though we don’t get to see anything that would give any insight into what their relationship was like when they were together and presumably happy, I do think it could be argued that Penny was kind of stringing Brad along by still not wanting to have sex with him after they had been together for two years. I think that if Penny really was waiting to have sex with a guy that she believed to be her soul mate, she should have figured out that Brad wasn’t her soul mate a lot sooner than she did. While I think it was pretty horrible of Brad to basically blame Penny for the fact that he cheated on her with another woman and got that woman pregnant simply because she still didn’t want to sleep with him after they had been dating for two years, I can’t say that I’d completely blame Brad for feeling like Penny was stringing him along.
Honestly, I think the story would have been a lot less frustrating and perhaps a lot better if Penny had been waiting to lose her virginity due to religious reasons instead of the reason she had been waiting to lose her virginity being because her parents told her that there was a family curse when there actually wasn’t. I think that could have opened up the story to a lot of interesting ideas for Barnette to explore if she had gone that route. Of course, that would have required Barnette to make more changes to the way Penny and Penny’s parents were written since none of them were all that religious.
Honestly, the reveal of Penny’s reasons for waiting so long to lose her virginity really pissed me off. There wasn’t really anything satisfying or genuinely compelling about the explanation for why Penny had been waiting to lose her virginity. It was just so stupid, and it really did make Penny seem like a naïve idiot to me. It always really upsets me when the reason or motivation for a fictional character’s decisions and actions that play a major role in the story ends up being really stupid, and Penny’s reason for waiting so long to lose her virginity is a great example of that.
While I understand that Penny being a virgin is fairly central to the story, especially considering that it’s referenced in the title of the book, I thought it was yet another thing that Barnette overemphasized in “Penny’s Story” compared to how she handled emphasizing its importance in “Ian’s Story”. After a while, I started to feel like the fact that Penny was a virgin kind of defined who she was as a character to a certain extant. It just got really old pretty quickly, and it consequently often made both Penny as a character and the story itself seem rather boring to me at times.
While Penny constantly annoyed the hell out of me in “Penny’s Story”, she thankfully didn’t reach the same level of annoyance that I feel towards Ana Steele in the Fifty Shades books or Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. There were quite a few times throughout “Penny’s Story” where I felt like Penny was slowly crawling in that direction though. As far as I’m concerned, if a fictional character reaches the Ana Steele and Sheldon Cooper level of annoying, then I can’t help but view them as being downright insufferable, once characters reach that level of annoying, it really starts to ruin a TV show, movie, or this case, a book, for me personally.
Moving on to a more positive topic, as I said earlier, I loved the character Sophie, and a big part of why I loved Sophie so much was due to her reaction to Penny telling her that she was starting to have doubts about whether or not her parents were being honest when they told her that there was a family curse. Her reaction was pretty simple and basically, “Gee, you think?”
Admittedly, I wasn’t all that crazy about Penny’s roommate, Rosa. It’s kind of hard for me to explain exactly why I didn’t like Rosa very much, because I was often very confused about the details that were given about Rosa throughout the story. At first I came to the conclusion that Rosa was gay since she has an ex-girlfriend that’s periodically mentioned and is also featured in the story briefly. Later on when I was reading that part of the story where Penny is on her period, Penny mentions in the narration that she felt like she couldn’t really talk to Rosa about that because Rosa apparently struggles with her gender identity and that she was also currently struggling with depression due her apparently having issues with her gender identity. Those comments made me think that Rosa was transgender, which can be a very complicated subject for people since every situation is unique. That left me wondering what Rosa’s particular situation was like since that was never further explored or explained beyond those brief comments in the narration.
Personally, I think it would have been really interesting if Barnette had developed that more and if she had further explored how those aspects of who Rosa is as a person potentially impacted the friendship between Penny and Rosa. Aside from the things that were vaguely mentioned about Rosa’s sexual orientation and gender identity, I just thought that she was kind of annoying most of the time that she was around. She made a few comments that led me to believe that she felt a certain amount of anger towards men, which was also never really explained. However, she did score some points with me thanks to her reaction to Penny telling her that her parents had indeed made up the whole story about there being a family curse that would keep people from finding love if they didn’t lose their virginity to the person that’s supposed to be the love of their life. Her reaction was pretty much, “I told you so.”
Honestly, Sophie and Rosa were a lot nicer about Penny telling them about the so called “family curse” than I definitely would have been if she had told me about that. The fact that Penny talked to Rosa and not Ian about how she had believed that there was family curse was one of things that made Penny seem really immature to me. If you ask me, that’s the kind of thing a person should tell somebody that they’re dating since it affects that person, too. You don’t just tell your roommate that your parents had been yanking your chain for years, and not tell the person that you’re dating. Sure, telling Ian that she was waiting to lose her virginity because her parents had told her there was a family curse might have made Penny look like a naïve idiot in Ian’s eyes like it did with me, but she still really should have told him about that.
When I was reading “Ian’s Story”, Penny’s parents both came across as being very unlikable people, but “Penny’s Story” made them seem even worse in my eyes. First off, they’re both pretty mean to Penny in general, and it seemed like they didn’t like her very much. Second, I thought it was pretty sad that they discouraged her dream of pursuing a career involving animals, namely octopods, or science and instead they apparently pressured her into getting a degree in business. Third, I can’t believe that they not only made her feel very pressured to pick a restaurant that they would approved, Penny ended up picking a restaurant that she established in the narration that she couldn’t really afford. It seemed pretty ridiculous that both of her parents are doctors, and yet they were expecting Penny to pay the bill for their dinner. Sure, Ian did end up saying that he would be paying for their dinner, but I still thought that was pretty lousy of Penny’s parents to expect her to pay for their dinner when they make more money than she does. Of course that all ended up being pointless since both Ian and Penny walked out on the dinner with Penny’s parents before their food even came.
That brings me to a problem that I have with not only “Penny’s Story” but “Ian’s Story” as well. It really bugs me that there was a serious lack of follow-up on what happened when Penny and Ian went to have dinner with her parents. Not only do Penny and Ian not talk about the vague conversation that Penny had with her parents about the so called “family curse”, there isn’t any follow-up or additional fallout between Penny and her parents regarding everything that happened at dinner. Once she leaves her parents at the restaurant to go after Ian, we don’t see or hear from Penny’s parents again. I really feel like Penny should have had to deal with some additional consequences and drama related to the dinner from hell that she and Ian were having with her parent. I think Barnette really should have done something like Penny ends up having a heated phone call with her parents about what happened at dinner or something else like that.
Plus, I really want to know what Penny’s parents did after both Ian and Penny left the restaurant. Did they also decide to leave the restaurant and find a way to get out of paying the check for their dinner since none of them ate their food? Did they end up having to pay for the dinner themselves? If they ended up having to pay the bill themselves, I think they totally deserved it because I felt like they acted horribly to both Ian and Penny when they were all together and were planning to have dinner with each other, and they simply seem like incredibly horrible people. Regardless, I really think Barnette shouldn’t have completely neglected to acknowledge what happened when Penny got together with Ian and her parents for dinner at some point in the story. That just seemed like really bad writing to me.
When I was reading “Ian’s Story”, I was definitely rooting for things to work out between Ian and Penny, and they very believable as a couple. However, reading the story from Penny’s point of view really made me wonder what they truly had in common with each other, what the basis of their emotional connection truly was and what Sophie’s reasons had been for thinking that Penny and Ian would be a good match when she decided to fix them up. Being somebody that loves to read romance novels, I think that one of the biggest sins that a writer can commit when they’re writing a romance novel is to write the characters and the relationship in such a way that the reader is left wondering why they should even care if the relationship works out. Unless the entire point of a book is to show why the relationship isn’t meant to last and why the guy and the girl aren’t right each other, it’s not good to have the reader be left thinking that perhaps the couple shouldn’t even be together, and that’s pretty much exactly how I felt for a large portion of “Penny’s Story”.
It really bugged me that Penny told Ian that she was completely invested and committed to their relationship, they were even talking about the possibility of having kids together, and yet she chose to automatically believe Bill when he told her that Ian had cheated on Gena. The fact that she refused to even give Ian the chance to tell her his side of the story really showed just how immature she could be at times. Sure, on the one hand, Ian had lied to his family and told them that the reason that he and Gena had gotten divorced was because he had cheated on her; on the other hand, she had just met Bill for the first time, but she was completely willing to automatically take his word over Ian’s.
Given what happened with Brad, it’s not all that surprising that she has a lot of trust issues, but the way Penny reacts to a lot of situations that come up throughout both “Penny’s Story” and “Ian’s Story” constantly made Penny come across as completely overacting and assuming the worst about Ian a lot of the time. The fact that Penny completely overacts to situations like her seeing Ian and Carrie at the restaurant together, or her discovering that Ian and Annie outside smoking cigarettes together can make her a very difficult character to understand and sympathize with. I think that’s especially the case if you’re reading “Ian’s Story” and you haven’t read this story yet. However, as I said earlier, much like reading Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian didn’t exactly change my opinion of Christian Grey for the better, reading “Penny’s Story” and being privy to her perspective of everything that happens in the story didn’t really help change my opinion of Penny for the better at times. It actually made me dislike Penny more at times compared to how I felt about her in “Ian’s Story”.
One aspect of both versions of First Time, but especially “Penny’s Story”, that I don’t necessarily think is altogether bad, and is more of a concern that I have about this book and people’s ability to enjoy it in the long-term sense is the fact that there are a lot of pop culture references throughout the book. The fact that this book features quite a few pop culture references makes me worry that years from now, those pop culture references are going to make the book feel dated and not as appealing to people as it could be. Most of the pop culture references were references to TV shows, and being an avid TV watcher, I was very familiar with all of the TV shows that were mentioned in the book. That being said, I personally have to question what exactly mentioning a variety of specific TV shows really adds to the story in the grand scheme of things. Honestly, the only reference to a TV show that truly benefitted “Ian’s Story” or “Penny’s Story” in any way was the reference to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. At one point in “Penny’s Story” it was established that they were watching the season 8 episode “Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer”, and Ian used Penny’s comment about the scene where Mac, Dennis and Charlie are at church and Mac has to tell them when to sit, stand, etc. during the service as a segue to asking Penny if she’ll come to church with him sometime.
I feel like I should note that in “Ian’s Story” the description of both the episode and the specific scene they were watching was relatively vague, but being a huge It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan myself, I immediately knew what episode and what scene Barnette was referring to when I was reading that part. Penny’s description of the reference to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is much more detailed than Ian’s since she’s a fan of the show, and Barnette even specifically says what the title of the episode they were watching is. In my opinion, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the funniest comedy on TV (Sorry, Modern Family), and I think it deserves way more recognition and attention in the media than it gets, so it was definitely nice to see the show be referenced to in both versions of First Time.
Part of why I worry that the pop culture references will make this story feel dated is the fact that the episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that was referenced originally aired in 2012. Plus, there’s also a reference to The Mindy Project, which also premiered in 2012, so that kind of made me wonder if the events of both versions of First Time took place in 2012. This will probably come across as nitpicking about the whole thing, but I suppose Penny and Ian could have been watching the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer” on DVD or as a repeat in syndication, but those particular references still kind of made “Penny Story” feel somewhat dated to me.
The one pop culture reference that I really do have a problem with is the part of the story where Ian and Penny are talking about their relationship, and Penny uses what happens to Jon Snow in the fifth book in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, A Dance with Dragons, as an analogy for how she felt about their relationship. The reason why I have a problem with that particular pop culture reference is because I’m currently reading A Game of Thrones for the very first time, so I obviously haven’t read A Dance with Dragons yet. Since I haven’t read A Dance with Dragons yet, I felt kind of lost during that particular part of “Penny’s Story”. Sure, it’s a pretty well known fact by this point that Jon Snow’s fate is very much up in the air at the moment, both in the A Song of Ice and Fire book series and on the show Game of Thrones, but since I just started reading the A Song of Ice and Fire book series and I just started watching Game of Thrones, I don’t really know anything about Jon Snow’s apparent death. Since I’m planning on reading the entire series, I’ll eventually be able to understand what Penny was talking about, but at the moment I’m rather confused and frustrated by that part of the book. While I’m on the subject of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, I’ll offer a little spoiler regarding my upcoming review for A Game of Thrones and say that my favorite character in the book so far is definitely Jon Snow.
Something I think people who write books or work on TV shows need to remember if they’re going to include lots of pop culture references in their work is that not everybody is necessarily going to be familiar with all of the things being referenced and not everybody is going to be able to understand those references. If they pack the story full of pop culture references, I feel like they run the risk of alienating their audience. That being said, I should probably mention is that I’m a big fan of the show Gilmore Girls, and that show was always known for its rapid-fire dialogue, which involved them constantly making numerous pop culture references. Admittedly I didn’t always understand all of the pop culture references that they made on Gilmore Girls, but I still love the show a lot.
Personally, I think the key to featuring a lot of pop culture references in a story and being able to make that work for the story is that the references need to contribute something worthwhile to the writing as a whole. They should serve an actual purpose rather than being included in a story simply for the sake of being there. For example, the reference to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia served an actual purpose in the story, because it facilitated the conversation that Ian and Penny had where he asks her to come to church with him. While I was somewhat confused by the reference to the book A Dance with Dragons, it still kind of served a purpose in the story. However, I still feel like the writing for that particular conversation could have done without the reference to A Dance with Dragons.
On the other hand, mentioning that Penny was watching episodes of The Mindy Project and Archer at various points in the story didn’t serve a purpose or add anything to the writing as a whole. If Barnette wanted to establish that Penny was watching TV at various points in the story, that’s fine, but I don’t think that the quality of the writing would have suffered in any way if she hadn’t mentioned specific TV shows in those two instances. For the record, I’m a fan of both The Mindy Project and Archer, but I still think that mentioning those two shows was completely unnecessary on Barnette’s part. Sometimes it seemed like she was trying too hard to be hip and current by making so many pop culture references in “Penny’s Story”. Personally, I think her writing is already pretty good without including so many pop culture references in the story.
While “Penny’s Story” definitely doesn’t live up to the awesomeness of “Ian’s Story”, I still highly recommend reading both versions of First Time since they each have plenty of different things and new insight to offer the reader. This will probably come as a shock to people given how critical I’ve been of “Penny’s Story”, but if you’re only going to read one version of First Time and you don’t want to be left with major unanswered questions, I would definitely recommend reading “Penny’s Story”. I say this because I feel like it provides information and insight that should have been featured in “Ian’s Story”, but sadly wasn’t. “Penny’s Story” may be an incredibly disappointing story, especially compared to “Ian’s Story”, but it’s definitely still worth reading.
That being said, my final score for “Penny’s Story” is 5 out of 10.
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