Queen of Likes

February 1, 2016
How can a middle school girl survive without her phone? Thirteen-year-old Karma takes great pride in the number of likes she gets on her Snappypic site. When her parents take her phone away and delete her account after she ditches a friend's bar mitzvah to attend to her profile, she feels doomed. Karma has rested her entire social life on her phone fame and doesn't know how she will live without it. But her social media prowess has come to the attention of the popular set in her school, and they ask her to join them in the school spirit-week contest. Their grade, the seventh, will compete against the sixth and eighth grades to win the prize at the end of the schoolwide celebration. It's a challenge to organize student activities without her phone, so she begins borrowing her friend's despite the school rule against that. As she juggles her new friends with the old and also tries to study for her forthcoming bat mitzvah, events begin to spin out of control. Homzie keeps the action and the comedy buzzing as Karma races through her school days, juggling her friends, duties, and interests, and manages to find a way for Karma not only to survive the loss of her phone, but even to thrive without it. Status updates and social media stats are judiciously sprinkled throughout Karma's first-person, present-tense account. Timely fun for phone-addicted middle schoolers. (Fiction. 9-13)

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