Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers asks a lot of questions and gives very few answers.
The questions are the knotty ones--the life/universe/everything kind of questions that you started to ask in your early teen years. They sent you into fits of screaming rage, monsoons of silent tears in the emptiness of your bedroom. Sent you rushing out the door to run, run, run--outpace the demons of despair; to go on walking or running or cycling until your legs hurt more than your head. Sent you climbing up to the roof to rail at the uncaring universe and find no answer there.
The questions are voiced by a trio of college freshman girls, roommates thrown together by fate...or is it random chance? Their families are simple stereotypes--one girl has the loving mom and dad; another, the absent mother and the rich but uninvolved father; and the third, the stolid, hardworking farmer who teaches his daughter her place in the world but reveals nothing else.
No men come on stage--except Plato, Shakespeare, and Homer. There are a few other girls, one of whom gets to develop a personality, but it's mostly just the three. And there is the mysterious, mystical dean of students, who asks even harder questions and doesn't try to explain the answers....
Maybe that's the point of the book--if a book needs to have a point--don't accept easy answers. But there are other points I'll let you find out for yourself. You'll probably find more of them than I did.
Ms. Skunick puts this book on her chapter called Read 'Em and Weep, but I would have called it Read 'Em and Scream. Because I still haven't figured out the answers to the questions.
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