Fake

August 1, 2019
Online you can be anyone. For Maisie Fernandez, a chance to be someone else quickly gets out of hand. Maisie is an artistic sophomore in Fort Collins, Colorado. At school she feels invisible, trying to blend in and avoid taking up space because of her weight. When she is assigned to be lab partners with her former bully, she snaps and takes revenge by catfishing her nemesis. Two major problems immediately present themselves. To create her alter ego, Sienna, Maisie uses images of a girl she discovers through the social media profile of a family friend, a girl whose family is considering relocating to Fort Collins. The resulting close scrapes between the real and online worlds drive the tension. Through her deceptive online conversations with her popular classmates, Maisie also discovers depths she had not imagined them capable of in her previous two-dimensional conceptions of them. At its core, the book grapples effectively with what it means to be real and how online interactions can both illuminate and obfuscate the humanity in others. Maisie learns a hard lesson about authenticity and objectification but emerges to find compassion from unexpected friends, vowing to pass it on to others and herself. Maisie is half Filipina and half white, and her classmates appear to be a fairly diverse lot. An intriguing modern morality tale with allusions to Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit in what it means to be real. (Fiction. 12-18)

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September 15, 2019
Grades 9-12 Sixteen-year-old Maisie Fernandez tries to hide in the shadows because she is overweight. Tired of being the topic of her classmates' jokes, she decides to create a fake online profile of what she deems to be the perfect girl?skinny, confident, and pretty?through which she plans to get back at her bullies. Things get tricky, though, when the girl whose picture Maisie is using for her fake profile shows up at school. One lie soon becomes many as Maisie struggles to keep up the ruse; it can't last forever. Cooner (Skinny, 2012) returns with another story that reflects the struggles of many teens today. The main tension in her work rises out of the characters' competing desires to be liked by others and to be their true selves, a problem further exacerbated by social media. However, Cooner fights the issue by showing, through Maisie, that acceptance from others begins with loving one's self. A great read with an uplifting message.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)