The Bookworm: 'The Perfect Date'

The Perfect Date, by R.L. Stine. 147 pages. Pocket Books. April 1996.

She had been so sweet, with her big eyes and cute nose. When he thought of her, he always tried to picture her before the sledding accident. But sometimes, especially in his dreams, he’d see her face the way it looked that day. (p. 23)

In the last few pages of The Perfect Date, Brady Karlin asks himself, “How could any of this be happening?” (p. 136). I’m asking myself the same question after finishing the book.

A year after his girlfriend dies in a sledding accident, Brady finds the perfect girl: Rosha. Brady wants her badly—despite the fact he already has a girlfriend—and Rosha believes she and Brady are meant to be together. The catch is that whenever he is with Rosha, something bad happens to Brady. Not only that, a girl with a scarred face keeps warning him to stay away from Rosha. Will Brady survive to find the connection between Rosha, the scarred girl, and the unfortunate events that happen to him?

First off, this is another Fear Street novel that was released in the spring but takes place during winter. Ugh! A snowstorm has dumped three feet of snow on Shadyside in the prologue, and the book ends with another epic blizzard (of snow and total insanity). There is a zero percent chance of spring weather in The Perfect Date but a 100 percent chance of unexplained weirdness. There is also another car accident at the end of a dead-end street, which is fitting since I just read Dead End.

Stine weaves an engaging and intriguing tale once again. He employs the usual misdirection to keep the reader guessing until the end—and afterward because the story remains tangled at the end. There are explanations, but they lead to bigger questions that are never answered. I go back and forth with whether these books need to have all their loose ends tied at the end. Fear Street is, after all, young adult fiction; it doesn’t need to be watertight. That’s not to say YA books can’t be watertight. I bet many are, but I don’t expect it with a series like Fear Street. However, it’s really annoying when the reader and main character ask “How could any of this be happening?” and neither are given a satisfactory explanation. I can accept it in some Fear Street books but not this one. I wanted more at the end.

It’s hard to feel empathy for Brady because the boy is a pig. Not only does his former girlfriend’s fatal sledding accident not affect him—he only thinks about Shannon once or twice during the course of the story—he’s constantly creeping, constantly eyeing other girls despite the fact he has a girlfriend. It is especially hard to feel for the kid when he becomes obsessed with Rosha and finding her. Teenage boys tend to be pigs like that, and some don’t mature with age, so he is realistic in that sense. Characters can’t be perfect, and it is fun to read one who is unlikeable; it makes it so much more pleasurable when he gets stabbed with a letter opener. Much like I wrote regarding one of my first re-reads, this series is meant to be an introduction to literary elements. Needless to say, I’m (re)learning many.

Speaking about being obsessed, much of the story revolves around Brady’s obsession with Rosha and finding her. The book is boring as a result. Brady spends about half of the book searching for her or stressing about being unable to contact her. It’s unexciting. It leads to cliffhanging drama, of course, but I could do without him going to her school and house and calling everyone with her last name in the phone book. The Perfect Date becomes a huge drag, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that much of the book is padding to fill a required number of pages.

Brady is among Fear Street’s few male protagonists. I would love to know the reason why there is such a gender imbalance among the series’ protagonists. I suspect it has something to do with the target demographic, but did the publisher feel more females than males would be interested in the stories? (If so, does that say anything about me?) Does it have anything to do with the horror genre and the tradition of final girls à la Halloween and just about every movie in the Friday the 13th franchise? Is there something deeper about believability or audience engagement that favors female protagonists? I need to look into it. The protagonist’s gender has never mattered to me—it certainly did not when I started reading the series in fifth grade—but it’s something I can’t help noting as an adult.

Brady has a study date with his girlfriend and best friend, which made me wonder: Do teens have study dates? Do they meet and pour over math and chemistry notes? I never did that and am becoming increasingly skeptical of the study groups that appear in these books. As someone who often thinks about writing more realistic Fear Street–style stories, it’s hard for me not to think about all the other things these characters would do during these “study” groups [wink, wink].

Here are some other worthwhile notes:

• Brady has call waiting, something that was becoming increasingly common in the mid-nineties. Though *69 was available, caller ID was still years away from wide use. I don’t think we got caller ID until around 2000. (My parents still use the caller ID attachments that feature the US West logo.) Regardless, caller ID would spoil a lot of drama in these older Fear Street books.

• Brady and Shannon use Flexible Flyer sleds in the prologue, which I thought was odd. A Flexible Flyer is a wooden, steerable sled that my grandparents and parents would have used when they were kids. Nobody used them in the nineties. I think it shows Stine’s age more than anything.

• Speaking about the sleds in the prologue, it’s unbelievable that Shadyside would receive three feet of snow. Three feet?! That would be the storm of the millennium.

• In the outdated category, Brady uses the phone book and mentions browsing the help-wanted ads in the newspaper.

• Here’s the special thing about The Perfect Date: the cover art features Stine’s son, Matt. That’s him about to get stabbed with a letter opener. I would have bought The Perfect Date anyway, but the cover makes the book very unique in the series. When I bought the book through a retailer on Amazon, I first received the reissued version with a different cover:



Needless to say, I ordered another copy.