Chicken Soup makes for a tastier book.

Whats interesting to me is that in the introduction to this book the Author seems so proud to have this amazing compilation of teen written work. This idea is not new. Chicken soup for the teenage soul has been around forever. The stories in this book seemed incomplete and often times lacked information that would have aided in understanding the point. I was actually excited to read the book RED because I thought it would be a lot like the Chicken Soup books. I was sadly mistaken and pretty disappointed. I had a very difficult time paying attention to the stories. A few of them were touching and very insightful and I really appreciated the authenticity of the actual teens using their own writing to express themselves. I just felt like this concept had been done before and it was done better by a different author. I felt like a few of the stories would make really good novel plots. It would have been a good assignment for us to imagine one of the short pieces into a full length novel. I felt like the girls were really whiney and would probably look back at what they had written and smack themselves in the forehead in shame because OMG the teen years are so trivial in the grand scheme of things. Most of these girls whine and moan about things that wont even matter to them ten years down the line, and the stories that did have some substance were so short it was hard to really understand what the girl is feeling. All in all I felt that RED will get sold back as soon as the final is over, but my Chicken soup books will forever own a spot on my self.