FAKE

Online you can be anyone.

For Maisie Fernandez, a chance to be someone else quickly gets out of hand. Maisie is an artistic sophomore in Fort Collins, Colorado. At school she feels invisible, trying to blend in and avoid taking up space because of her weight. When she is assigned to be lab partners with her former bully, she snaps and takes revenge by catfishing her nemesis. Two major problems immediately present themselves. To create her alter ego, Sienna, Maisie uses images of a girl she discovers through the social media profile of a family friend, a girl whose family is considering relocating to Fort Collins. The resulting close scrapes between the real and online worlds drive the tension. Through her deceptive online conversations with her popular classmates, Maisie also discovers depths she had not imagined them capable of in her previous two-dimensional conceptions of them. At its core, the book grapples effectively with what it means to be real and how online interactions can both illuminate and obfuscate the humanity in others. Maisie learns a hard lesson about authenticity and objectification but emerges to find compassion from unexpected friends, vowing to pass it on to others and herself. Maisie is half Filipina and half white, and her classmates appear to be a fairly diverse lot.

An intriguing modern morality tale with allusions to Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit in what it means to be real.