Rowena’s review of #scandal by Sarah Ockler.
Lucy’s learned some important lessons from tabloid darling Jayla Heart’s all-too-public blunders: Avoid the spotlight, don’t feed the Internet trolls, and keep your secrets secret. The policy has served Lucy well all through high school, so when her best friend Ellie gets sick before prom and begs her to step in as Cole’s date, she accepts with a smile, silencing about ten different reservations. Like the one where she’d rather stay home shredding online zombies. And the one where she hates playing dress-up. And especially the one where she’s been secretly in love with Cole since the dawn of time.
When Cole surprises her at the after party with a kiss under the stars, it’s everything Lucy has ever dreamed of… and the biggest BFF deal-breaker ever. Despite Cole’s lingering sweetness, Lucy knows they’ll have to ’fess up to Ellie. But before they get the chance, Lucy’s own Facebook profile mysteriously explodes with compromising pics of her and Cole, along with tons of other students’ party indiscretions. Tagged. Liked. And furiously viral.
By Monday morning, Lucy’s been branded a slut, a backstabber, and a narc, mired in a tabloid-worthy scandal just weeks before graduation.
Lucy’s been battling undead masses online long enough to know there’s only one way to survive a disaster of this magnitude: Stand up and fight. Game plan? Uncover and expose the Facebook hacker, win back her best friend’s trust, and graduate with a clean slate.
There’s just one snag—Cole. Turns out Lucy’s not the only one who’s been harboring unrequited love…
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Sarah Ockler writes my kind of contemporary YA’s. The kind that makes me all swoony.
Lucy has liked Cole since the first time she saw him but before she could tell her best friend how she felt about him, Ellie asks Cole out…and they get together. Lucy wasn’t happy about it but what could she do? She’s tried to bury her feelings for Cole and for a long time, it works but even though the feelings are buried, they’re not necessarily gone. So when Ellie gets sick right before prom, she asks Lucy to go to prom with Cole and even though it’s the very last thing she wants to do, Lucy goes.
And gets a whole lot of drama for her troubles.
A kiss that rocked her world is splattered all over Facebook and Lucy’s world takes a nosedive. She’s involved in a scandal that has hurt her best friend and this book takes place as Lucy forms a makeshift Veronica Mars team to help her find out who is on a fast track to ruining Lucy’s life. Her main objective is to clear her name and to win Ellie’s forgiveness.
One of my favorite things about this book was all of the Veronica Mars references. I just discovered the awesomeness of that show and the show is so fresh in my mind that seeing Lucy get her Veronica Mars on, endeared her to me. But let me tell you, it wasn’t always a walk in the park with Lucy. I thought she took a long time to come around with just about everything. She made a lot of boneheaded mistakes that made me want to smack some sense into her but in the end, it was all good.
The love interest, Cole was a great love interest. He was equal parts sweet and hot all rolled up into one awesome package and I enjoyed the page time that he got. My only gripe with Cole was that we didn’t get nearly enough of him. It would have been nice to get more than we got of him because what we did get was fantastic.
Overall, this story hit all of my happy buttons. The story itself was interesting and it kept me guessing about who did it all because I thought that the person they were pinning it on was too obvious and then it hit me. I knew who did it. And when I ended up not being wrong, I shook my head because…damn. Kudos to Ockler on writing another enjoyable story that is sure to entertain readers all over. I’m certainly glad that I didn’t wait to read this one.
Grade: 4 out of 5
This book is available from Simon Pulse. You can purchase it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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