The International Kissing Club

Gr 7–10—Piper, Cassidy, Mei, and Izzy have been best friends their whole lives. Unfortunately, they've also been stuck in the small, boring town of Paris, TX. When Piper hears about their high school's foreign exchange program, she knows they have to participate. Before they separate to go to different far-off locales, the girls create a Facebook page called "The International Kissing Club" (IKC), where they share their kissing conquests under false identities. Romantic Piper leaves for Paris, Mei leaves for China in search of love and her birth parents, and Cassidy heads for Australia. Unfortunately, family money worries mean that Izzy ends up stuck behind. The flat characterizations, predictable plotting, and underdeveloped settings make this novel read like a cheap knockoff of Ann Brashares's "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series (Delacorte). Each character's sections are written in indistinguishable third person, a lost opportunity for readers to identify with them. Likewise, the minimal use of the Facebook page to move the plot along is disappointing given how inventively other books have employed social networking. When the girls return home and are betrayed by a former enemy turned Izzy's new friend, the fallout is hard to believe.—Jennifer Barnes, Gleason Library, Carlisle, MA