Private

by Kate Brian

Grade: Good
Story: Reed Brennan has decided (for some reason) to join an elite school.

This book is so TOTALLY not the type of book I'd usually pick up, simply because of it's cover, and it's title, and the fact that it has a million sequels. And it's about mean, privileged girls who look down on anyone who isn't mean and fashion conscious.
But bookshelvesofdoom has remarkable powers of persuasion. So I picked it up.

And...
It was good enough. I actually rather liked it a fair bit, in some ways. I greatly love school stories, and I don't care if the school is mean and privileged, so long as the characters aren't. And the main character isn't, actually. But she so desperately wants to be that it drove me rather batty. I mean, how desperate can someone get? But I speak from ignorance. So I should stop.

In fact, I think it was mostly how much Reed wanted to be with the mean girls that bothered me, not the mean girls themselves. They were rather interesting, actually, in a mean kind of way.

Finally, and perhaps the main reason why I didn't love it, there were Secrets--which I normally love. But it ended on an inconclusive, and not entirely satisfactory note. So in other words, I'd have to read the sequels to find out what's going on. But because I didn't love the book, I can't be bothered to read the sequels, which means I'll never find out the Secrets unless I do some hard researching. Which is way too much effort. I may as well just read the sequels as do that.