THE PRETTIEST

Next up in our YA lineup for the day is The Prettiest. 

This one has a pretty simple premise. Someone wrote a list ranking the Top 50 prettiest girls in the 8th grade and the book follows the fallout. 

Shy, book-obsessed poet Eve is shocked to find herself at #1, while most popular girl Sophie is equally shocked to find herself at #2. 

Eve endures attention she doesn't want from being hit on and pursued to nasty comments saying she wrote the list herself. She's painfully shy and awkward, so she has no idea how to handle any of this, especially in the wake of her having had some body developments over the summer. 

Sophie is obsessed with her looks. She comes from a lower-income, single-parent family and hides where she lives from her friends. She's afraid being second will topple her place at the top of the popularity food chain. 

Nessa is Eve's best friend, a theater star. Being plus-sized, she's not surprised she's not on the list at all, but she handles everything with more realism and self-confidence than the other two main characters. 

The girls end up teaming up to try to out the list writer, who they think is popular boy Brody. They try to exploit his current interest in Eve, but that backfires spectacularly. As more and more comes out and things change, the team grows to include more girls and one of Brody's former male friends. 

There's a lot going on in this book aside from just body positivity issues. There's a bit of anti-Semitism (Eve is Jewish) and racism (Nessa has a quick couple lines about prejudice her family has faced because her mother speaks Spanish) that's brushed aside maybe a little too quickly. There's the girls dealing with being the target of a popular boy after he feels rejected by them. He tried to pressure Sophie into kissing him and she refused, which led to fallout there. There's distance between family members for different reasons. Parents and siblings reacting to the list in different ways. Definitely a hell of a lot of sexual harassment in various forms. 

One of the main themes between all the characters is how we handle the wrong things we see. Eve is actually hard to like for a while, because she's such a mouse that she never speaks up to defend a friend or herself against abuse until she's pushed to extremes. Nessa isn't accepting of Eve's behavior in various ways and their eventual making up feels too easy. There's a lot more to this, but I'm keeping quiet to avoid spoilers. 

I enjoyed the book, but I felt like it could have been expanded in many places and been better for it.