TRUE LOVE, THE SPHINX, AND OTHER UNSOLVABLE RIDDLES

Beginning as a lark, an Egyptian trip turns serious when love enters the equation. Salah and Sam attend Manhattan’s Bowers School for Boys and Rosie and Octavia are enrolled at London’s Queens Ladies College. Their joint vacation down the Nile has the students excited because guys know school trips are meant to be “about hot girls in foreign countries” and girls plan to scope out guys “to pull.” The problem is the guys are interested in the wrong girls. Octavia wants Salah, but Salah is smitten with Rosie, and Sam is infatuated with Octavia. Patterned after a stage-play farce, frustration mounts as the he-said, she-said rumors are manipulated and friendships deteriorate. Told from four different points of view, the story moves along quickly, and several Egyptian landmarks lend a romantic backdrop. The content is a bit more mature than an average middle-school romance novel. One character gets drunk and couples wind up in bed together, but sex occurs only off the page. Released too late for a beach read, but still fine escapism. (Fiction. YA)