SWITCHED

Teenagers Laura and Willa are as different as their respective working class and privileged lives. Laura, scholastically bright and hardworking, shares a housecleaning business with her single mom. She longs to attend a high-ranking university, but is resigned to her affordable fate of a local public college. Willa, daughter of a high-society family, the Pogues, continually disappoints her weight-conscious mother and falls way below her father’s academic expectations for a respectable place in the Ivy League environment. However, both girls share one factor: their appearance. When Laura is hired to clean the Pogue mansion, she’s confronted by her look-alike, opposite and a modern-day “Prince and the Pauper” scenario results. Willa convinces Laura to change places and attend her boarding school for one semester while she moves in with Laura’s new stepsister and cleans houses for the business. Wollman fleshes out both characters, giving each a separate identity with some serious soul-searching conflicts. Themes of self-worth, hard work and commitment are found in a pleasing story concluding, like most fairy tales, with each girl finding her true path in life. Predictable yet somewhat visionary in its finale. (Fiction. 10-14)