Pretenders
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Three girls, two guys, five secret journals.
The five most popular students at Noble High have secrets to hide; secrets they wrote down in their journals. Now one of their own exposes the private entries...
I am leaking these because I'm tired and I know you are too. The success bar is too high and pretending has become the only way to reach it. Instagrams are filtered, Facebook profiles are embellished, photos are shopped, reality TV is scripted, body parts get upgraded like software, and even professional athletes are cheating. The things we believe in aren't real.
We are pretenders.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Noble High is a pressure cooker of a school where excellence is expected and truly outstanding freshmen have a shot at making the "Phoenix Five." As they start at Noble, aspiring actress Sheridan, basketball player Duffy, beautiful and driven Vanessa, home-schooled genius Lily, and Jagger (who doesn't "have time for a last name") have been assigned to keep journals. Initially resistant, they succumb to the lure of writing down their feelings, chronicling crushes, worries, and increasingly compromises, confusions, and corner-cutting. In this series opener, Harrison (the Clique series) makes the characters distinct and lively, starting from the isolation of day one and effectively building up their interactions and the resulting complications. By book's end the students are barely into their first semester, and readers don't yet know how they ended up with the coveted recognition of being named to the Phoenix Five or which one of them leaked the diaries that expose them as "phonies" and pretenders. Harrison will need to write fast: this book ends with a lot of questions that readers will want answered. Ages 13 up.
