So as we learned in the last SVH adventure (you DID read my re-cap, right? ) George has been cheating on Enid with Robin Wilson. They met in their flying class, and Robin has already dumped her ex Allen Walters for George. George is planning to drop Enid as well. But before he breaks her heart, he's going to take her on his first flight as a licensed pilot since he promised her he would.
Oh, and did I mention Liz knows about all this cheating? And never tells her "best friend" Enid? I won't even begin to go into how annoyed that makes me, because then I'll be ranting for six pages. Elizabeth really gets me pissed sometimes.
George and Enid go on their flight, and yup, it ends in a Crash Landing! They land in Secca Lake, and Enid risks her life to save cheatin' George who is passed out underwater. Enid ends up temporarily paralyzed, and George walks away with barely a scratch.
Now George feels guilty, and goes to break things off with Robin, at least until Enid recovers. Jessica and Lila see George in front of Robin's house when he's breaking up with her, and Jessica suddenly acts like she cares about Enid and is all like "George is such cheating scum!". Never mind that Jessica herself is quite the little cheater.
Jessica tells Liz who pretends like she didn't already know, and Liz makes Jessica promise no to tell anyone. Jessica doesn't keep this promise, (DUH), and once she tells her friends they all decide to start ignoring Robin. I guess since Enid is seriously injured, they're on her side. I love how all of them suddenly are SO against cheating, when most of them cheat and steal boyfriends all the time! I mean, that's pretty much the plot in 90% of these books.
Robin isn't aware of the cold war being waged on her, and when she goes to sit with her friends at lunch, they all get up leaving her sad, and "looking hungrily at Cara's uneaten ice cream". Haha.
She starts to gain some weight, and thinks, "It took too long too get myself thin. I'm not going to let my figure go". Huh??? Last I checked, Robin dropped that weight in about two weeks
Probably one of the best parts of this so-so SVH book is when Enid shows up at the dance with George and Lila exclaims: "who goes to a dance in a wheelchair? One of the reasons I love Lila. She is both hilarious and awful.
Problems start right away, when it becomes painfully obvious that Robin and George are into each other. Especially when he dances a song with Robin at Enid's insistence, and they totally have a "romantic moment", making it really obvious to everyone that something is going on. Enid dismisses the whole thing the next day, acting like everything is fine.
Enid had a surgery earlier that was supposed to get her walking again, but she doesn't seem to have a will to walk. She knows that George won't leave her as long as she's in a wheelchair,so she's resigned to never walking again. At this point, George can't even hide his disinterest in Enid, making their dates very strained and awkward. Between Enid's desperate cheerfulness and George's indifference, it's almost painful to read about.
Elizabeth must step in and save the day, and of course the first step is to consult Mr.To-Catch-A-Predator (Aka Mr. Collins). She tells him about the whole Enid issue, and he praises her for her "keen understanding of human behavior"". She blushed, and I cringed a little.
After this inspirational chat, Elizabeth thinks up a plan to get Enid back to her usual boring, walking, self, involving Mr. Collins' son Teddy.
Elizabeth invites Enid over while Teddy is at her house swimming in the pool, and leaves Enid in charge of Teddy while she goes inside for a few minutes.
Teddy pretends to drown, and Enid freaks out and jumps out of the chair and into the pool to save him. OMG she can walk!! Elizabeth's little plan is revealed, and within 5 seconds Enid decides that she'll be fine without George, and that he should be with Robin. That was a quick recovery.
They celebrate Elizabeth's successful (and child-endangering) plan with champagne and wine. I thought drinking was only for high school drop outs and school tramps?
The sub-plot is (get ready to be shocked...) Jessica chasing after a guy! Oooh. Jessica's latest prey is the teacher of the cooking class she and Lila apparently signed up for in Showdown, (don't remember that), and he actually sounds pretty hot.
"he was well over six feet tall, his broad shoulders tapering to a slender waist. He had jet-black hair, and chiseled features."
Did I mention he's french and twenty six? Sign me up.
Of course Jessica is absolutely sure that he won't be able to resist her jailbait charms, and works extra hard in the cooking class to earn his admiration. She even plans to ask him to the school dance (since when were 26 year old men allowed to go as dates to high school dances????). Buuut turns out he's got a hot girlfriend already. And she can't even cook! Ouch.
Jessica actually had another motivation to become a great cook besides hot guys, believe it or not. She wants to show her family that she can cook dinner just as well as Miss perfect Elizabeth, and attempts to cook mussels for them. She doesn't cook them right, causing some major food poisoning that sends Ned, Alice, and Elizabeth running to the bathroom. Coincidentally, Jessica didn't eat the mussels, so she was spared. It's one of the only times you ever hear about a Wakefield going to the bathroom, by the way.
Ned and Alice's wedding anniversary is coming up soon, and Jessica is determined to show up Elizabeth, and get her parents the best gift ever, especially after the whole mussels incident. For some reason she thinks making them a gourmet dinner is a good idea. You think that she would lay off cooking for them, since she like, just made them sick with her cooking a day ago.
But Elizabeth ruins everything as usual by giving her parents tickets to a dinner-theater show on the day Jessica was planning to make their dinner. When she tells them about her present, they make some rude jokes about her crappy cooking and tell her maybe she can cook the next day or something. Then they go back to gushing over Liz for the rest of the book, making Jessica contemplate doing something drastic..like Runaway!
Moral of Crash Landing: don't pretend to be paralyzed to hang on to a man, especially if he's cheating on you. Well, there goes my plan to get and keep a boyfriend!
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