4.5 stars
It’s not exactly easy being Chloe Green, the bisexual girl with two mums when also trying to become valedictorian at Willowgrove Christian Academy in a small Alabama town. She keeps trying to protest against the school’s puritanical rules with frequent dress code violations, but also has to make sure she doesn’t actually end up expelled. Chloe has friends, having quickly befriended the other queer kids at Willowgrove, but she’s mostly avoided interacting too much with the rest of the student body.
Everything changes when her academic nemesis, the most popular girl in school, prom queen, not to mention the school principal’s perfect daughter, Shara Wheeler, pulls Chloe into a maintenance elevator, kisses her with some serious intent, then slips away. Two nights later, just as she is about to be announced prom queen, Shara disappears without a trace. One month before graduation, Shara is nowhere to be found. Chloe is furious (and rather confused about the kiss). She refuses to win valedictorian by forfeit. That would be an empty victory. Oh no, Chloe needs to see Shara’s face when she discovers that she’s been beaten, which means finding her.
Chloe breaks into Shara’s bedroom to look for clues and is startled when Rory Heron, the bad boy from next door climbing in through the window. It turns out that Shara kissed him too, one night before Prom, and now he’s wondering what happened to her. Chloe and Rory find a note on Shara’s distinctive stationery addressed to Rory, but the note also mentions Chloe, as well as Smith, Shara’s quarterback boyfriend. Rory isn’t exactly wild about the idea of telling Smith Parker, Shara’s longtime boyfriend, that both he and Chloe kissed Shara. Chloe, however, wants to get to the bottom of Shara’s cryptic clues, so insists Smith needs to be told. Smith gets over the fact that his girlfriend cheated on him with two others remarkably quickly and is persuaded by Chloe to join in on the strange scavenger hunt Shara seems to have arranged.
While Chloe has barely spoken to Smith, star quarterback and one of the most popular guys in school or Rory, well-known deadbeat and rock musician, she’s now forced into an unlikely alliance with both of them in order to locate all of Shara’s infuriating notes. She has to go to popular people parties, break into the principal’s office, crawl through air ducts (like in an action movie) and before she knows it, she suddenly knows a lot more about both Smith and Rory. She also, unfortunately, has to keep lying to her mums, not to mention her loyal friends.
Finding Shara becomes an obsession for Chloe (much more so than for Smith and Rory) and while searching for her nemesis, she discovers a lot of unexpected truths about Smith, Rory, Shara and herself. Will Chloe find Shara in time for final exams and graduation, so she can show Shara once and for all who is best?
Full review here.
