College application fees, cheerleading camp, stuff like that. I had Riley Pilkington, the school’s resident math whiz, figure out a repayment plan and everything. Plus, I’m totally going to pay her back-with interest, even. The special part being that I’m desperate. But I swear I don’t normally go around asking my friends for large sums of money. I can’t even read the covers of her magazines without going to sleep.Īnd for the record, I know this looks bad. In addition to being incredibly rich, Justine is also incredibly smart, which means she reads the most boring magazines ever. Can you say, Life is so not fair?įor what? she replies absently, turning a page of the (yawn) Newsweek magazine spread out beside her lunch.

Yeah, while my grandfather spent the sixties selling love beads out of a beat-up version of the Mystery Machine, Justine’s grandfather was busy going to Harvard medical school and inventing some sort of super-important surgical thingy that revolutionized twenty-first-century medicine and made a bajillion trillion dollars. Read moreĬhapter One In preparing for this pageant, how much did you spend on wardrobe?Ĭan I borrow two thousand dollars? I look hopefully across the lunch table at my best friend, Justine Renault, who, unlike me, is incredibly rich. If you're looking for a light read to entertain you Crowned is a definite winner. Presley's final comeuppance of Megan through gaining the boyfriend Megan has always wanted and releasing an embarrasing video is extremely satisfying and could even lead to Presley (as runner-up) replacing Megan as Miss Teen State - leaving things open for a possible sequel. That's just the beginning though - there's a compromising picture of Presley posted online, the hair dye in her shampoo, and Megan's self-shredded swimsuit to be blamed on Presley. Presley's archrival Megan is a perfect foil as a cruel and manipulative competitor who steals Presley's boyfriend in the opening pages of the book. The action is full of drama, but there's some nice information on being aware of the dangers that the expanding online world holds in terms of publicity. Presley knows she's not smart enough to get scholarships to college and that her single mom will never have enough money to send her, but she's good at pageants and they're her ticket to breaking the cycle of poverty.

While the focus is on a beauty pageant contender, Presley is a well-rounded character with understandable and admirable goals. Crowned is charming and frothily fun fiction for teenage and young adult girls.

Crowned by Julie Linker