Meet Alana/Meet Kaylee

Gr 9 Up—A hi-lo series opener about older teens living in Las Vegas. Eighteen-year-old Alana, the daughter of a billionaire hotelier, and Kaylee, the new girl in town with a mysterious past, play the leading roles in this volume. This "flipbook" is told from two points of view; at the completion of one young woman's story, readers can flip the book over to read about the events from the other protagonist's perspective. The plot is simple: Alana feels pressure to impress her father with the launch of Teen Tower, and Kaylee, recently homeless, has bright ideas on how to make the project a success. Alana offers Kaylee a job as her personal assistant in return for round-the-clock access to Kaylee's creativity. But will Alana's father and friends ever truly accept Kaylee? The most satisfying parts occur when teens get an inside look into what happened offstage in the other point of view, such as Kaylee's trip to the Hoover Dam with Ellison. Some scenes that were already described in detail in the previous girl's vantage point are accelerated in the following story. Despite this, there is still too much repetition of events and dialogue. Characters appearing briefly may come across as stereotypical, particularly the Japanese spa workers and Zoey's two moms. Meg Cabot's Airhead series (Scholastic) is only slightly more challenging to read and is the safer bet for satisfying fans of the glam-girl genre.—Alison O'Reilly Poage, formerly at Cutchogue New Suffolk Free Library, NY