| Title: | Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality | |
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| Author: | Elizabeth Eulberg | |
| Publisher | Scholastic Inc. | |
| Publication Date: | March 1, 2013 | |
| Publisher's Description | A hilarious new novel from Elizabeth Eulberg about taking the wall out of the wallflower so she can bloom. Don't mess with a girl with a Great Personality. Everybody loves Lexi. She's popular, smart, funny...but she's never been one of those girls, the pretty ones who get all the attention from guys. And on top of that, her seven-year-old sister, Mackenzie, is a terror in a tiara, and part of a pageant scene where she gets praised for her beauty (with the help of fake hair and tons of makeup). Lexi's sick of it. She's sick of being the girl who hears about kisses instead of getting them. She's sick of being ignored by her longtime crush, Logan. She's sick of being taken for granted by her pageant-obsessed mom. And she's sick of having all her family's money wasted on a phony pursuit of perfection. The time has come for Lexi to step out from the sidelines. Girls without great personalities aren't going to know what hit them. Because Lexi's going to play the beauty game - and she's in it to win it. |
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| My rating: | **** | |
I was intrigued by the publisher’s description of this title, and excited when I was granted access to read it. That excitement did not wane while I was reading this book. Despite being a quick read, Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality is chock full of fairly intense issues. Lexi was a great protagonist: realistic, believable, and sympathetic even when displaying teenage cluelessness. With the exception of Brooke, who was a completely awful human being and lacked anything resembling a redeeming quality, every character in this book displayed the type of depth that makes for compelling reading.
Benny and Cam were great friends; they were supportive, but not mindlessly so, and it made me happy that Lexi had them in her life. Lexi’s interactions with her parents were painfully realistic, and the rollercoaster nature of her relationship with Mac a great depiction of how siblings get along (or not).
Over the course of this novel Lexi went through a lot. She took some sometimes dodgy advice, followed her heart, left her comfort zone, and learned a lot of painful and valuable lessons. I wanted to stand up and cheer when I got to the end of the book. Nobody saved Lexi, or fixed her, or rearranged her world. No boy kissed her worries away. Lexi was her own hero, and demonstrated why so many people in this book relied upon the good head on her shoulders (fairly or not)! In addition to being entertaining, I think that this book has a lot of good, non-preachy things to say about figuring out how to balance capability and self-reliance with enriching friendships. I’m recommending this title for inclusion in our young adult collection.
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