NOW YOU SEE HER
Jacquelyn Mitchard
HarperTeen
Fiction
Hardcover: 0061116831
Paperback: 9780061116865
224 pages

• Read an Excerpt

To Hope Shay (real name: Bernadette Romano, which just won't cut it in Hollywood), Romeo and Juliet is more than just a school production. It's life. Only a sophomore, Hope has scored the part of Juliet, a role that makes her the envy of all the upperclassmen. And why shouldn't she be envied? She has a special talent for acting, a way to make characters come to life. Her talent is what got her into the famed Starwood Academy, a prep school for fine arts students, and it's what makes a film actor named Logan Rose fall in love with her.

Hope's mother calls it The Gift. The Gift is what gets Hope the lead in a production of Annie and some spots in TV commercials. It makes Hope different from other kids --- more mature, more ambitious --- but a side effect of this difference is that she has no friends. At Starwood, she believes, people will be more like her. Instead of thinking she's stuck-up for having an agent, they'll admire her and talk acting with her. Or so she hopes.

What a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.

Life imitates art as Hope tells a story of falling in love with her (onstage and real-life) Romeo, Logan. They have to keep their romance a secret for many reasons, so Hope becomes consumed with their clandestine meetings. Together, they make what Hope calls The Plan. They'll move to L.A. or New York, waiting tables and auditioning for the roles that will make them stars, and then get married. The Plan, however, starts to crumble when Logan asks the question that engenders The Idea: "What would you say your parents think you're worth?"

The Idea is for Logan and Hope to fake Hope's kidnapping and get about $20,000 in ransom money from Hope's parents, enough for them to start on The Plan. Logan will "find" Hope and be considered a hero. But when Hope goes through with The Plan, staging her own kidnapping without Logan, we begin to see that all is not right in Hope's mind. Is she really in love with Logan, or is it more an unrequited obsession? Where do her lies begin and end?

Hope's journal is a passionate, frightening look at the destructive power of mental illness. In her story, she is both the heroine and the victim, while everyone else is the villain. Since we readers only see Hope's side of the story, we are led to believe that Hope is the stage star with the perfect boyfriend --- the person she not only wants to be, but would like everyone else to believe she already is. As in Chris Lynch's INEXCUSABLE and Gail Giles's DEAD GIRLS DON'T WRITE LETTERS, we have no choice but to follow an unreliable narrator down a path of deceit, confusion and, ultimately, the bitter truth.

   --- Reviewed by Carlie Webber

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