Upper Class by Hobson Brown, Taylor Materne, and Caroline Says

Nikki is pretty much the spunkiest girl you will ever meet. She comes from a family with "new money" and has been sent to attend the prestigious Wellington boarding school to escape the bad influences of her friends back home. She's loud, sparkly, and utterly oblivious. Then we have Laine who is a Wellington girl from the start. She's more reserved than Nikki but knows her place at the school because she has had many of her family members attend and come out as bright politicians or blooming business owners. She's also the star of the field hockey team as only a sophmore so even though she has friends, she has enemies too. Both girls are trying to find their spot among the rich and rather snobbish kids that attend Wellington. But just surviving is harder than they expected. Will they be able to flourish at the academy or will they be just another entry in the The Crash Test book that records all the failures and dropout students who haven't had what it takes to make it?

Urgh. I think if I tried to write down all my thoughts in a single paragraph it would be both long, boring, and completely confusing. So for just this review I'm categorizing my thoughts into good and bad.

Good: TONS of description. For example, the first sentence reads as so; Outside the black window of the country club, moonlight glazes tiger lilies, dripping off the petals like cream. Doesn't that sound completely delicious? And their are many other sentences in the book that are as warm and sparkling as that one. I think I would've read the book just to be able to read nice sentences like that one. The story also has a nice and zippy plotline. Nothing ever stops for long and there's twist after twist to keep you coming back for more. There is also a character that I liked a lot who I think deserves a spot in the good category and that would be Nikki and Laine's woods instructor. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but I liked him a lot.

Bad: And now we get to the juicy stuff. First of all, the characters were horrible. They were not developed at all and I really couldn't tell one person apart from the next, especially the boys and the parents. They just all blended together which makes a story completely suck. Also, Nikki and a guy supposedly had this relationship going on, but I really didn't see that. Sure they hook up in random scenes, but there was no dialog, no interaction, no chemistry, nothing to indicate that they actually liked each other. And characters without chemistry? Yuck. Also, the zippy plot was in the good category, but it should also be in the bad, because you could barely get your bearings before everything was mixed up again, making the whole entire book confusing and unorganized.

So I guess for the most part, Upper Class was a pretty bad book. I really liked the imagery, but other than that, it stunk. I don't think I'll be reading the next book. I have better things to do with my time.