The unwritten rule is that you don’t like your best friend’s boyfriend—in a romantic sense, anyway. Sarah and Brianna have been best friends since kindergarten. Sarah, sensitive and mousy, has always played sidekick to outgoing, beautiful Brianna. Sarah has also liked Ryan since eighth grade, but she can’t break the news now because Brianna and Ryan are dating. Then Sarah and Ryan kiss, and he confesses he likes her, too. Sarah knows that revealing the truth to Brianna will devastate their friendship, but she believes that what she has with Ryan is true love. The love triangle is complex by itself, but Scott gives it extra dimension by adding a painful look at Sarah and Brianna’s toxic friendship. Readers need to read between the lines of Sarah’s first-person narration to see that even as Sarah provides Brianna a refuge from her verbally abusive parents, Brianna visits that same abuse upon her. They will cheer her growing self-awareness as Sarah sees that she is as deserving of love as Brianna, even if she isn’t as bold. (Fiction. 14 & up)
