Josh
Josh Richter is a boy Mia is crushing hard on, though it is difficult to understand exactly why. Well, it is not that difficult at first because she makes it plain. But once you get past the obvious Josh is less appealing: there’s no there there:
“A lot of the boys look totally geeky in our school's uniform, which for boys is gray pants, white shirt, and black sweater, long-sleeved or vest. Not Josh, though. He looks like a model in his uniform.”
Pop Culture
It was probably Stephen King that made referencing then-current pop culture iconography acceptable in faction. Try a little experiment sometime: go back and read novels written before Carrie and see how many times a recognizable pop culture thing is mentioned (anything from Coca-Cola to a movie star). The answer in the case of pretty much every thing single best-selling author before King will be “not often.” And there is a perfectly valid reason for this. The following metaphor may have been hot stuff at the time and still fairly recognizable now, but come back in another twenty years:
“Lana looked at me like I'd just said I'd never watched Bring It On, or something.”
Portrait of Genovia
Mia is Princes of Genovia, but Genovia, of course, does not really exist. It might as well be Mos Eisley or the left-wing half of Oklahoma. Still, all it takes is one well-placed, efficiently phrased simile and a reader can instantly imagine it in their mind:
“It's very sunny nearly all the time, with the snow-capped Alps in the background and the crystal-blue Mediterranean in front of it. It has a lot of hills, some of which are as steep as the ones in San Francisco, and most of which have olive trees growing on them.”
Only in Fiction
Another way to tell that Genovia doesn’t really exist is that Mis is both a Princess and funny. The only princesses allowed to be funny are fictional. Diana could be funny, but if she was she would always have to immediately pretend like it wasn’t on purpose. (The assumption being, of course, that since Charles was often funny, but never on purpose and not for the right reason, it made her look like the smart one.) Speaking of which, Princes in real life are allowed to be funny, but only if they are the spare and never if they are the heir. But Mia, yeah, she’s funny:
“You never saw anyone who looked LESS like a princess than I do. I mean, I have really bad hair that isn't curly or straight; it's sort of triangular, so I have to wear it really short or I look like a Yield sign.”
Mia the Poet
Mia is also a poet, although even her poetry has a comic dimension to it. But behind the humor is a very serious attempt at poetic metaphor that comes off quite nicely. People who are funny are also usually quite serious. Although they are not necessarily always quite so poetic in spirit as in her “Ode to Algebra”:
“Thrust into this dingy classroom
we die like lampless moths
locked into the desolation of
fluorescent lights and metal desks.”
