The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading Blog Tour

Today I'm hosting Charity Tahmaseb and Darcy Vance, authors of The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading, on their blog tour. Here's their guest blog:

When people ask me about The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading I usually tell them it’s a novel about two smart, kind of geeky girls who find their way onto the varsity cheerleading squad. It’s the story of their season on the squad. But it’s also a story about falling in love for the first time, and a story about being a good friend to someone – even when that person is not being such a good friend back. It’s a story about who really matters in the world. More than anything else though, The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading is a story about expectations.

When geek girl Bethany hears her best friend whisper, “Cheerleading tryouts,” she never expects they will really go through with it. And she certainly never expects they will make the squad. She says to her friend, “There are places girls like us don’t go and cheerleading is at the top of that list.”

It’s a good thing there isn’t really a list like that, because some pretty famous (and important) people would be in Big Trouble.

Like Katie Couric. According to one of her former teachers, she was “always a great student in Math”. She was also a cheerleader…before becoming the first female solo news anchor for a major television network.

As a teenager, award winning comedian and musician Steve Martin taught himself to play the banjo and do magic tricks. How geeky is that? In college, he studied English poetry and philosophy, and considered becoming a professor.

Long before Samuel L. Jackson was a bad a** mutha****er fending off snakes on a plane, he played French horn in his high school’s orchestra – where he was also a cheerleader.

If a news anchor, comedian and actor aren’t enough to convince you that geeks really can be cheerleaders too, what about a President of the United States, or maybe four? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were all cheerleaders in high school or college.

And then there’s Kiki Bader. She was both editor of her high school newspaper and a cheerleader. As further evidence of her dual dorkiness, she once chipped a tooth while twirling a baton during a football game. Kiki went on to become Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Even after learning what all of these cheerleader/geeks accomplished, you might still be saying: Yeah, but none of this is exactly rocket science.

You want rocket science? What about Jaime Dyk? She first got interested in science and space when she was in the 7th grade. She was a cheerleader in high school, then went on to coach cheerleading as a part time job during college. In 2000, Jaime had an unusual choice to make. She was one of 16 finalists for the Laker Girls (NBA Cheerleaders), but she had also been offered a job with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Hmmm… Cheerleading? Science? Cheerleading? Science? Science eventually won out and Jaime Dyk helped design the Mars Land Rover.

Expectations and stereotypes don’t really serve any useful purpose. Just because someone is a geek, that doesn’t mean they can’t be a cheerleader too. And just because someone is a cheerleader, it doesn’t mean they can’t become a news anchor, an actor, a president, Supreme Court Justice – or rocket scientist either.

There is no list of places that any of us can’t go when we decide to look – and live – beyond labels. The sky (or at least Mars) is the limit!

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Thanks, Charity and Darcy! =D

And if you don't know what The Geek Girl's Guide to Cheerleading is about, here's the description:

When Bethany -- self-proclaimed geek girl -- makes the varsity cheerleading squad, she realizes that there's one thing worse than blending in with the lockers: getting noticed. She always felt comfortable as part of the nerd herd, but being a member of the most scrutinized group in her school is weighing her down like a ton of textbooks. Even her Varsity Cheerleading Guide can't answer the really tough questions, like: How do you maintain some semblance of dignity while wearing an insanely short skirt? What do you do when the head cheerleader spills her beer on you at your first in-crowd party? And how do you know if your crush likes you for your mind...or your pom-poms?

One thing's for sure: It's going to take more than brains for this girl genius to cheer her way to the top of the pyramid.

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I've already read the book, and it was quite good. Since I haven't reviewed it, I will point you towards Jordyn's review.

Every comment you leave on one of the tour posts will enter you in a contest to win a Geek Girl prize basket. So comment!

Check out the rest of the tour dates over at the Goddess Fish blog and visit Charity and Darcy at their website/blog here.