How to Ruin a Summer Vacation By: Simone Elkeles

Spending time with friends, tanning at the beach, shopping on Michigan Avenue, and going on dates with your new boyfriend, these are the ideal activities for a teenage girl to do during a perfect summer vacation. Too bad for Amy Nelson, the protagonist in How to Ruin a Summer Vacation, her summer will not be filled with any of these activities. Amy is a spoiled teenage American girl who is thrust into an eye opening experience when her part time father decides he wants to take her to Israel to learn more about his culture and where he grew up and lived. Against all of her crying and whining, Amy’s mother agrees with her father and sends her to Israel for the summer.

Throughout the novel, Amy is placed into many uncomfortable situations, the first one being that her dad never told his family that he had an illegitimate daughter in America. When Amy meets his side of the family for the first time, she realizes that she is very removed from her father’s heritage, and she is not sure she wants to embrace it at all. As the novel progresses, Amy learns about her Jewish heritage through her grandmother and an older teenage boy named Avi. She also comes to realize that her cousin O’Snat and her more in common than she initially thinks. Her summer vacation may not be ruined after all, if she can find away to break down the walls that she has built around her.

Overall, I really enjoyed Simone Elkeles’ book How to Ruin a Summer Vacation. At first, the portrayal of the main character turned me off because she was so self-centered and arrogant. However the more I thought about it the more I realized that teenagers are very concerned with their own world as opposed to the world around them. Elkeles’ portrayal of Amy was an accurate, yet sometimes stereotypical portrayal of an American teenager. I also found the fact that Amy was raised in a non-nuclear family to be very realistic. Many teenagers today are raised by a single parent and only see some parents as part time parents, as Amy did. Elkeles portrays the difficulty in forming a relationship between a parent and child in this aspect. Another aspect that I truly found engaging about this book was the correlation between fiction and non-fiction. Elkeles does an excellent job of bringing in information on Jewish heritage as well as the conflict in Israel between the Israelis and Palestinians. Because of the content and the main character, I would recommend this novel to teenagers in high school because it is a fun and engaging book, that not only provides a dramatic plot, but an informative one as well.