Crazy Love

Gr 9 Up—Kamiyah Nichols's family is so financially secure that her father buys her a BMW for her sweet sixteen. As role models, however, her parents lack the basic necessities: they can't communicate with their daughter, who's beautiful, smart, ambitious, volatile, and insecure. She's a spoiled rich kid who figures it's better to spy on her man than to keep a relationship honest. Thus the subtext of Crazy Love is an exploration of how an obsessed teen can stealthily crawl through the online personal data of another. "Fly girls never look thirsty," she tells herself when she meets Sincere Lewis at a party, but she can't slow down because he's a catch: a college student who's top-drawer sexy and headed for the NBA. But if the plot turns on whether or not Miyah will give it up for Sincere, it also produces the novel's best writing. Their intimate moments show him at his most patient and undemanding, a well-drawn contrast to Miyah's awakened passion. Never mind that he also holds on to old-fashioned ideas about marriage that she, a bound-for-Juilliard ballerina, hotly rejects. Then her bright future starts sliding downhill when she's arrested for starting a fight with a rival at a pizzeria. That wakes up the Nichols family and leads to some soul searching, therapy, and, possibly, change. Hear the clichés ringing? Sure, but teens will still keep reading.—Georgia Christgau, Middle College High School, Long Island City, NY