Lamar Public Library

When granted her wish to be the most popular girl in school, Wilma, an eighth grader, forgets that she will graduate in three weeks and her popularity will vanish.

When scholarship student Nikki Maxwell, whose father is the school exterminator, decides to enter the talent show at her expensive private school, her nemesis MacKenzie threatens to reveal Nikki's status to the rest of the school.

When eleven-year-old David Greenberg's best friend makes the start of middle school even worse than he feared it could be, David becomes friends with Penny, who shares his love of television shows and posts one of their skits on YouTube, making them wildly popular--online, at least.

Nearly a year after a failed suicide attempt, sixteen-year-old Elise discovers that she has the passion, and the talent, to be a disc jockey.

"It's a frenemy showdown and Nikki Maxwell has the worst luck. Of all the schools she could have been assigned to for the student exchange week program, she's stuck at North Hampton Hills, her arch nemesis MacKenzie Hollister's new school. Even worse, there might just be someone at NHH who can out-MacKenzie MacKenzie! At least Nikki can write about every moment of drama in her diary, so readers won't miss a moment of it. Can the queen of dorks survive...

"Everyone knows the cool beans. They're sooooo cool. And then there's the uncool has-bean . . . Always on the sidelines, one bean unsuccessfully tries everything he can to fit in with the crowd--until one day the cool beans show him how it's done.

Each of the girls in a middle-school clique reveals the strong, manipulative hold one of the group exerts on the others, and the hurt and self-doubt that it causes them.

"When Rafe Khatchadorian is sent to Camp Wannamorra, he teams up with his bunk mates to fend off the more "popular" kids' plans to ruin their summer"--

Nikki's diary describes a frightful Halloween, on which she helps with her sister's ballet class party at the same time she is Brandon's date for their middle school Halloween dance, where she has promised to spend the evening with her two best friends.

After being involved in a drunk driving accident in the spring, Paige Sheridan spends the summer in Paris as an au-pair and then returns to her suburban Iowa existence for her senior year of high school, where she begins to wonder if she wants more out life than being popular, having a handsome boyfriend and all the latest clothes, and being a member of the social elite.