Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight by Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow

Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight is two weeks in the life of Joel Hedges and Cat Davis. Joel would prefer to get through his final year of high school without Cat Davis or his mother's faux Spanish boyfriend and just hang-out with his best-friend Luke. Cat Davis has an annoying best-friend, and even more annoying little brother, and a deep abiding hatred of Joel Hedges.

 Due to an unfortunate incident involving a leaking pen and suspected outbreak of Bird Flu, Joel and Cat are forced to sit next to each other in Extension English. To make matters worse, and to their mutual horror, they are paired together for a tandem story writing assignment.
  I have just finished listening to the audio-book version of Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight and loved it!

The book will most definitely keep you laughing and if you’re like me and live outside of Australia you’ll only be able to get an audio-copy, but fear not, the accents are awesome. Or at least they are to an Australia obsessed girl.

 Cat Davis and Joel Hedges are just two teenagers with a mutual resentment for each other so obviously neither of the pair are too happy about being paired together to do a tandem story. At the start they both come up with totally different ideas – and I will admit to preferring Joel’s – but by the end they still are coming up with crazy ideas, just ones that fit together slightly better.

 I have a thing against dual point of views, but Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow pull it off well. I enjoyed hearing things from both Cat and Joel’s point of view, though I found Joel to be more amusing. I don’t think the story would have worked as well if it wasn’t in both of these characters point of views; which is very hard for me to admit.

 Cat is a goody-two-shoes, grade obsessed, smart girl. She’s stubborn and has a tendency to refuse to believe what she doesn’t want to be true. She can be quite sarcastic at times and is a lot less whiney than most female protagonists.

 Joel is funny and extremely judgemental. He thinks things about people, things he has no right to think just because he hasn’t got to know the person. He’s probably my second favourite character in the book, the first being Luke, his best friend. Luke and Aaron’s tandem story is undoubtedly the best.

 The book was filled with funny scenes, finger love, Joel and Betty as the break-up team (they weren’t called that in the book, but I’m naming them that) and the brutal, merciless things they did to each others characters in the tandem all made me laugh.

 I’d give this book five out of five because it most certainly did “amaze me.” (Book review written with an Australian accent reading the words in my head as I type.)