Kale, My Ex, and Other Things to Toss in a Blender

March 15, 2017
It's summer before senior year, and Mia, who needs a boyfriend to -feel like a person,- finds herself on the receiving end of a publicly humiliating breakup.Her best friend, Justine, hatches a revenge plan: catfish ex-boyfriend Seth via social media and make him fall in love with fictional -Katie,- thus ensuring his total destruction. -Slightly chubby- Mia, who's already decided on revenge-through-weight loss, acquiesces, and the two white girls go ahead with the plan. As their scheme progresses, they express doubt about their actions, but that doesn't stop them from seeing the plan to fruition. As Mia's body shrinks, thanks to her overconsumption of creatively named smoothies, so does her lingering love for Seth; other factors play a role in her changing attitude, but weight loss seems to be the key ingredient. (To Justine's credit, she'd rather enjoy the cookies than worry about an extra 10 pounds.) What had the potential to be a delightful summer-vacation story is marred by the dysfunctional weight-loss narrative, the girls' obsession with appearance, and only a modicum of diversity. (Justine and Seth are both Jewish.) Decent enough for readers looking for something fast and fun to pack in a beach bag, but young feminists will likely throw it at the wall. (Fiction. 13-17)

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March 1, 2017

Gr 6 Up-Mia and Justine begin their summer trying on cute bathing suits to wear to a pool party. It's going to be a great summer for Mia, who has an awesome boyfriend, Seth, even if she does have to work serving sno-cones out of a truck. But when Seth breaks up with her to hook up with another girl, she can focus only on her heartbreak. In order to support Mia, Justine creates a fictitious girl complete with Facebook page and social media profiles to entrap and humiliate Seth. Meanwhile, summer continues: Justine meets a young man working for the summer at the bank. Mia starts to form a "more than friends" relationship with Dennis, Justine's cousin. The two teens spend the summer making smoothies instead of sno-cones and cyberstalking Seth. Mia and Justine do experience guilt for coming up with the fake profile but still carry on with the ruse. Mia stubbornly does not allow herself to get over Seth even while spending time with Dennis. Told from alternating perspectives, the narrative portrays the protagonists as stereotypical self-involved teenagers without nuance or character development. There are no real consequences for the cyberstalking. VERDICT Not recommended, even for libraries looking for beach reads and lighthearted middle school fare.-Patricia Feriano, Montgomery County Public Schools, MD

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2017
Grades 7-10 Mia was going to have a summer to remember: for the first time, she's got a boyfriend. But then Seth brutally dumps her, and Mia's best friend, Justine, overhears Seth and his friends trash-talking Mia for her weight. Justine isn't about to let Mia waste her summer moping over a jerk, so she devises a plan. The girls create Katie, a fake online persona; the plan is to make Seth fall in love with Katie and then break his heart. They'll be able to keep tabs on him easily: they've got a summer job driving a snow cone truck. Mia, though, isn't sold on revenge, and she focuses her energy on using the truck's blender to make healthy smoothies that are soon selling faster than the snow cones. Told in Mia's and Justine's alternating narrations, this is a frothy summer story of heartbreak and new love. It's sometimes overly dramatic, and Mia's body image story line could have been more developed, but the celebration of strong female friendship is admirable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2018
When Mia's boyfriend callously dumps her, Mia and her best friend, Justine, plot revenge by creating an online girl for Mia's ex to fall for. Though the girls' IRL interests keep the pages turning, their lack of remorse over their own cyber-cruelty is unsettling, and the story over-focuses on Mia's imperfect body and the smoothies that promise to make her thin.

(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)