The Acronym Girls

THE PLAIN JANES

By Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Minx. Paperback, $9.99

After Metro City is bombed, Jane's parents are finished -- ready to move as far as possible from a town haunted by missing-person posters and Orange Alerts. They squire their teenage daughter away to the colorless confines of suburban Kent Waters.

"As though anywhere is really safe," Jane notes with a verbal eye roll. But her parents won't budge. And so, at the start of Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg's amusing, if occasionally puzzling, graphic novel The Plain Janes, Jane enters Buzz Aldrin High under that most dreaded classification: The New Girl.

At first, she seems destined for a life of solo lunches and Friday nights at home. But Jane decides to reinvent herself, to shed her skin and shake up the town in one fell swoop. She hunkers down at the nerd table with -- crazy coincidence alert! -- Jane, Jayne and Polly Jane. As protagonist Jane sees it, these science geeks and soccer jocks could become a team -- her team -- of artsy rabble-rousers. The P.L.A.I.N. ("People Loving Art In Neighborhoods") Janes are born.

In the beautifully rendered romp that follows, P.L.A.I.N., determined to break out of the blandscape, undertakes a series of renegade public projects: crafting pyramids out of construction-site rubble, filling the town fountain with dishwashing liquid, placing dozens of garden gnomes in front of the local police station. The authors are skillful at capturing the rudderless intensity of high school years. The girls imagine themselves bold art provocateurs, but The Plain Janes is really about 21st-century adolescence at its most mundane. Class is boring. Parents don't understand. Jane forms a crush on a guy whose shaggy hair and vintage jeans hold her in thrall. To fans of action-packed plotting, these chronicles may sound as mild as school cafeteria food. But the book feels modern precisely because it rejects so many clichés about teenage Sturm und Drang.

Still, many characters seem formulaic and surprisingly underdeveloped. Jane's parents are clueless worrywarts. A gay male student likes clothes and makeovers. The school's pretty girl reacts to the strip-mall pyramids by saying, "I don't love art in neighborhoods. I love shopping." And whether it's a sardonic misfit or a hair-fluffing mall rat, nearly every character is thin and Caucasian. In a story that purports to be about subverting the social order, it's disappointing to see characters illustrated with all the imagination of a Hilary Duff movie. ·

-- Suzanne D'Amato is deputy editor of the Sunday Source.