Reading Record for Women and Literary Culture

The Cheetah Girls: Shop in the Name of Love

November 3, 2007 at 10:47 am (The Cheetah Girls)

The story is told by Chanel, who likes to spend time with her father’s girlfriend Pamela and loves shopping. Her mum doesn’t like her daughter to spend time with Pamela and forbids her to accept and take any presents from Pamela. To make that clear, Chanel’s mum gives her daughter her credit card and allows her to buy one dress for her big meeting with The Cheetah Girls Club. But instead of buying just one outfit, Chanel buys several things. She spends a lot of money with her mum’s credit card. Chanel believes that she can give her mum the money back, because she will make a lot of money with The Cheetah Girls anyway. So she even buys things for Dorinda who doesn’t have enough money to buy nice outfits.

Unfortunately, her mother realizes that Chanel has spent so much money with her credit card and forces her to stop being a member of The Cheetah Girls. Luckily, Galleria’s mum can calm Juanita down and makes another suggestion how Chanel should be punished. Finally, Chanel has to work in Galleria’s mum store to work off her debts.

Another part of the story deals with The Cheetah Girls, who finally don’t sign the contract with Mr. Johnson, because the contract is actually a trap. The girls’ group new manager is now Galleria’s mum Dorothea. She wants to bring The Cheetah Girls to the top.

When you read this story, you realize that the girls are quite disrespectful towards adults. You  cannot take your mum’s credit card and buy as many things as you want!!! Chanel should have been happy about ordering just one outfit as her mother told her, but instead she bought all the things she wanted to have. Even though she bought some stuff for Dorinda, I don’t think she ordered the clothes, because she wanted to make Dorinda happy. She wanted to make herself happy! She wanted that all the girls looked good so that she herself didn’t need to be ashamed of the group members. Here you see again that their friendship is mainly based on labels and nice clothes.

But we should consider that Chanel’s mum forbids her daughter to be friends with her father’s new girlfriend and even tells her not to accept any presents from Pamela – which I think is really odd. Juanita should instead be very happy when her daughter gets along well with her father’s girlfriend. She shouldn’t be jealous, and if she was jealous, she shouldn’t show that jealousy to her daughter. Her daughter is an individual and can decide on her own with what people she likes to be friends with. I am sure that it is not easy for Chanel to cope with her parent’s divorce, and her mum makes the situation even worse by forbidding her a good relationship with her new stepmother. Chanel has to cope with a quite unstable environment, and maybe that’s a reason for her love of shopping. She wants to heal her offended sensibilities by buying as much stuff as she wants.

What I haven’t mentioned so far when writing about the first book Wishing on a Star was the slang the characters use in the book. I really have problems understanding their talk, even though there is a glossary at the end of each book. I’m not sure if it makes sense to use so many slang words when writing a book. It just makes the characters appear worse, and the readers have problems understanding the phrases. What you realize though when you read the slang words is that the kids come from multicultural backgrounds. This might be the reason why Deborah Gregory used so many slang words when writing the books!

Still, I am not a real fan of The Cheetah Girls, because I simply cannot identify with them or their parents. The age of the girls is surely not the reason, because when I read Nancy Drew or Anne Shirley, who is even younger in the first book, I could really feel and identify with the characters. They made me an aspirational reader, whereas The Cheetah Girls stories so far haven’t fascinated me at all.