THE RISE AND FALL OF A 10TH-GRADE SOCIAL CLIMBER

A Texas teen moves to New York and learns the hard way that honesty is the best policy when you’re climbing the social ladder. After her parents separate, Mimi Schulman, “daddy’s girl to the core,” leaves Houston to live with her lonely, bewildered father in Brooklyn Heights and starts her sophomore year at Baldwin High, a progressive prep school where the “Coolies” reign as the class’s most eccentric and popular girls. When Mimi’s childhood friend Sam warns her there is no way a new girl from Texas could ever fit in with this elite group, she bets him she will be one of the Coolies by semester’s end and sets out to infiltrate the kooky crowd. Obsessed with the Coolies and their fast-paced, trendy, outrageous round of parties, drinking and drugs, Mimi gradually discovers they are real girls with real problems underneath the glitz, glam and Goth. But just as Mimi thinks she has won her bet, she comes close to losing her friends and herself. Offbeat and worldly wise. (Fiction. 13-15)