The Virginity Club by Kate Brian | Rating: ★★★★☆

Revised review, originally reviewed in 2008. Originally I gave the novel five stars but I’ve kicked down one star during my reread. Kate Brian is known mostly for her best selling series Private, as well as the spin-offs and prequels to the series, and when I was in middle and high school I owned almost every book she’d ever written. Aside from the Private series, my most read book by her was The Virginity Club.

I can’t tell you what I loved so much about it, perhaps it was the close friendship that was held between the four main characters who start a purity club in order to win a scholarship which requires them to have “purity of the mind and soul” (ugh, I know, right? But they do acknowledge the weirdness of this requirement frequently in the novel) but for one reason or another this novel was one of my most read books in my early-mid teens.

The thing about the main characters in The Virginity Club is that they are all different and lovely in their own right. I liked the diversity in characteristics and race. I liked that each girl fit perfectly with each other and had different struggles, interests and backgrounds and that they had every reason to run in different circles but they didn’t.

The Debutante by Kathryn Williams | Rating: ★★★★☆

Revised review; originally posted in 2008. The Debutante has the perfect formula down when it comes to its target audience. Kathryn Williams is charming as always in her writing as she presents to us a lovely coming of age story that appears in a young girls life when her family decides to up and move to a new location and home during her senior year of high school.

Although The Debutante isn’t a groundbreaking novel by any means, it is surely enough to keep you entertained when you’re in the need of something light and fluffy to read in your free time. It manages to take a familiar formula of writing and turns it into something that still remains refreshing and often hilarious. This is something that Williams manages to do with ease and for that, I love her.

Our story opens with teenager, Annie McRae, having just found out that she will be relocating with her parents to Alabama. This news comes about at a very sensitive time: before senior year begins. And as many people know, senior year is often a crucial time in a teenagers life and to be taken away from all that is familiar? It’s rough. Alas, after some begging and hoping her parents are set in their ways to move.

Such A Pretty Face by (Various Authors) | Rating: ★★★★☆

"What’s a frickin’ enormous chin hair between friends?"

When I was in my early teens, I needed a book like this.

By the time I purchased it, however, I was nearing the end of my high school career. But even so… there’s something about each short story featured in Such a Pretty Face that touches my heart and makes me smile. It certainly made me feel like less of an idiot, and it made the memories of my early teenage days bug me less and less.

(Even the introduction lends a hand at creating a sweet atmosphere for the stories that follow.)

Inside this novel, is a collection of short stories meant to inspire you to embrace all forms of beauty, by varied authors you may already know: Lauren Myracle, Mary Ann Rodman, Chris Lynch, Louise Hawes, Jacqueline Woodson, Norma Fox Mazer, Tim Wynne-Jones, Jamie Pittel, J. James Keels, Ron Koertge, Ellen Wittlinger and Anita Riggio. If you don’t know some of them at the start, you will remember them by the tales they tell within.