CRACKED UP TO BE

High-school senior Parker Fadley used to be the most popular girl at her Catholic school. That was before her boyfriend Chris’s party last summer. Since that night, teetotaling Parker suddenly quit the cheerleading squad, broke up with Chris, started drinking heavily and attempted suicide. What made Parker run off the rails? Readers patient enough to wade through the annoyingly repetitive flashbacks and overly precocious dialogue eventually discover that Parker witnessed the rape of her best friend but was too drunk to do anything about it. When the girl goes missing and is later found dead, Parker is consumed with guilt, and systematically goes about ruining her perfect life in an attempt to make amends. After finally confessing her guilty secret to parents, friends and the authorities, Parker’s scorched-earth campaign smolders to an anticlimactic stop. Issue-laden and overwrought, Summers’s debut will make forgettable fodder for the insatiable readers of Gossip Girl (and her many series clones) but is bound to leave teens who like a little more lit in their chick lit cold. (Fiction. 14 & up)