The story of how I came to receive the ARC of SMART GIRLS GET WHAT THEY WANT isn’t quite interesting really. I had requested DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN but it wasn’t alone in its envelope. Tucked behind it was this cute blue contemporary, and my first thought was, “What is this doing here? I don’t really ever read contemporary YA.” So I tucked it away on my review shelf and forgot about it for awhile. When I finally returned to it, woefully later than I had anticipated thanks to my own stupidity, I didn’t know what to expect. Smart girls getting what they want…I would like to use this paragraph to profusely thank Alison, the darling publicist at Harper, for sending this book to me. I don’t know how you did it, but you read my mind and totally changed my opinion towards contemporary cutesy YA. Now I love it and want to have contemporary cutesy YA babies.SMART GIRLS GET WHAT THEY WANT follows sophomore Gigi and her friends Bea and Neerja, three utterly smart girls who have one little problem – they completely lack a social life outside their circle. They have perfect GPAs, but when Gigi is accused of conspiring with the jock Mike over the extra credit on a test, her life is thrown upside down. So the threesome decides that they are not going to go down the road of being social outsiders. They join sports teams, the school play, student government – anything to pull themselves from the bottom rung of the social hierarchy.This book blew me away. With sunshine and rainbows and smiles. I read this on the way to the beach and back, and I found myself in the backseat of my car just wanting to keep turning the pages over and over again, even when I saw the ocean. “Not now!” I told my mother, shooing her away as I struggled to finish a chapter. Finally she pulled me away, but I was left swimming with the sharks wondering what would happen next – would California Will be lovable or hateworthy? Or would Neerja be cast in the play? Would Mike be as idiotic as he seemed?As a so-called “smart girl” in high school who didn’t really evolve past the “loner smart girl” stage, I really did identify with Gigi even if I am 10 years older. With her issues of fitting in, succeeding in life, boys, family, and friends, I was taken back to high school where I didn’t fit in. This book has so much that teens (and older) can identify with. The writing was great and served this story well. Snappy dialogue, well-paced scenes, a conclusion that made my heart skip a beat. This book brings so much to the table for me and I cannot wait to push it onto all my friends. In fact, one has already promised to pick it up, and I plan on discussing this one with her soon. And can there be sequels please? I think there is so much about this story that could be developed further – Neerja’s new romance, Bea’s relationship with her parents over skiing, Gigi’s future. My only qualm was the underdeveloped adults in the story, and I love a good adult in my YA. But aside from this, this book was flawless.High fives for you, Sarah Strohmeyer. You’ve made me a fan of YA Cutesy Contemporary (I’ll never stop calling it that).Would I recommend this story? Hell yes.VERDICT: A surprisingly cute, endearing story about a girl trying to discover herself in the halls of high school, SMART GIRLS GET WHAT THEY want is the perfect summer story for fans of ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS. A definite must read.
