Girl Wonder review

Description: As if transferring senior year weren't hard enough, Charlotte Locke has been bumped to lower level classes at her new school. With no friends, a terrible math SAT score, and looming college application deadlines, the future is starting to seem like an oncoming train for which she has no ticket. Then Amanda enters her orbit like a hot-pink meteor, offering Charlotte a ticket to something else: popularity. Amanda is fearless, beautiful, brilliant, and rich. As her new side kick, Charlotte is brought into the elite clique of the debate team—and closer to Neal, Amanda's equally brilliant friend and the most perfect boy Charlotte has ever seen.

But just when senior year is looking up, Charlotte’s life starts to crumble. The more things heat up between Charlotte and Neal, the more Neal wants to hide their relationship. Is he ashamed? Meanwhile, Amanda is starting to act strangely competitive, and she's keeping a secret Charlotte doesn't want to know.
Talented newcomer Alexa Martin delivers a poignant story of first love, jealousy and friendship, where the ups and downs of senior year have never been so complicated. What else can Charlotte do but throw her hands up and ride?

My Thoughts: This was one of the only times I could merely tolerate but not quite like (initially) the main character of a book. She was extremely insecure and attracted to all the wrong things. There were even certain scenes where she admits she’d rather have a good outward appearance rather than be good on the inside. And that’s what attracts her to Amanda as well as her new crush Neal. 

But she doesn’t want to see that they aren’t as good on the inside as they are on the outside. And there is one person her age, one voice of reason that tries to get her to realize that she needs to choose better friends, but she’s so insecure that she won’t take his advice, at least at the beginning of the book.

The thing about Amanda was that she wasn’t your typical two-faced friend. Although she did things that weren’t right, she didn’t constantly belittle Charlotte, or hang out with her only when she felt like it. It was the type of situation that, unless you knew her type of person, you didn’t know that there was necessarily something fake or bad about her. And the same could be said about Neal. And until they actually did something extremely wrong, it was sometimes hard to tell that they were any different than many young adults that want to go to parties, drink, make out with attractive people, and be selfish.

It wasn’t till the end of the story that I started to like Charlotte and started to realize that her response to everything that was happening to her was more realistic than most characters in other books. There was no drastic change in her, although she did change. And had Amanda and Neal not shown their true colors, she’d probably still be hanging out with them. But that’s an honest reaction, because it seems to be easier to stay in certain situations than it is to get out of those situations, which was something I could relate to. 

I guess what made this book likeable was that once I got into it, I saw how honest it was and how I could see a little bit of myself in some of the characters. So it started slow but ended up right where it needed to be in the end.