The Black Sheep by Yvonne Collins & Sandy Rideout

Title: The Black Sheep
Author: Yvonne Collins & Sandy Rideout
Age Group: Teens
# of Pages: 348
My Rating: 3/5

Kendra Bishop lives in a house strictly base on rules. Her family even own a thick binder full of them! She learns to tolerate with her banker parents and their weird ways. Until they fired her favourite nanny, Rosa, for not following the rules.

Furious, Kendra writes up a letter to the reality show called The Black Sheep. It's where two different teens that are sick of their own family get to switch places to experience a new atmosphere. For a whole month, the teen and their host family would be filmed for the show and be watched throughout all of North America.

A month later the filming crew appears on Kendra's doorsteps, giving her quite a shock! Unable to refuse, she is immediately sent over to California to stay with the hippy Mulligan family. With the producer breathing down her neck constantly and causing drama, Kendra tries to balance her new found stardom and her first love for the oldest son, Mitch Mulligan. What will happen when the show exaggerates to truth, making everyone turn against her?

I think all of the characters are way too one-dimensional. Kendra is basically a "good girl" living in an overbearing family who barely makes contact with the outside world. (Her best friend Lucy has to give her information about the latest celebrities so she won't get lost when her peers start talking about entertainment!) After meeting the nature loving Mulligans, she soon fall in love with an otter in the aquarium near their home. She makes a protest group to protect the otters' environment when a rich golf club is planning to use the habitat for their business. I find this part of Kendra very tacked in. As in used only to make her seem "deeper". Then again, she would be even more of a bore without her love for the otters. Same goes for Mitch. His character seems to contradict. At first he is seen a jerk. But then after, he becomes a nice guy (and it continues going back and forth)! I wish his personality is more concrete and should have went through some sort of dilemma to transits his character development more smoothly.

The whole novel seemed fly by as being bleh. I was falling asleep on it and there is nothing that stood out to me to let me remember about it a year from now if I didn't make this review. I am disappointed because I was told that it's a good novel. Maybe if the authors thought about the characters more carefully and added more twists to the plot, it may turn out better.