Get Ready for War

March 15, 2013
Four hundred pages of posturing lead nowhere in a second volume featuring four starlet frenemies at elite Hollywood High. Even though London, Rich and Spencer can barely stand one another, they decide they have to stay nominally friends since each knows too much about the others. (Heather, whose point of view was represented about equally with the other girls' in the first volume, spends much of this sequel in rehab, and her segments appear only haphazardly.) Despite their ostensible truce, however, the three girls spend most of the novel verbally and physically fighting with one another, their mothers and the boys in their lives--including one particularly over-the-top moment in which Spencer pulls out a pair of nunchucks in the school's cafe. Readers who enjoy a well-turned insult may get some pleasure out of the seemingly endless ways the girls find to call one another and their enemies fat, ugly, slutty and, in one particularly uncomfortable case, Asian. After several hundred pages, however, even clever put-downs get stale. Although there is some buildup to a climactic party, the story ends on a cliffhanger with no party in sight. More tedious than scandalous. (Fiction. 14-18)

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