Book: Private by Kate Brian

Published by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

Purchased for my Nook (240 pages)

Genre: YA: Contemporary

Find out more: Goodreads~Barnes And Noble~Amazon~Kate Brian

Goodreads Summary: Tradition, Honor, Excellence…and secrets so dark they’re almost invisible Fifteen-year-old Reed Brennan wins a scholarship to Easton Academy — the golden ticket away from her pill-popping mother and run-of-the-mill suburban life. But when she arrives on the beautiful, tradition-steeped campus of Easton, everyone is just a bit more sophisticated, a bit more gorgeous, and a lot wealthier than she ever thought possible. Reed realizes that even though she has been accepted to Easton, Easton has not accepted her. She feels like she’s on the outside, looking in. Until she meets the Billings Girls. They are the most beautiful, intelligent, and intensely confident girls on campus. And they know it. They hold all the power in a world where power is fleeting but means everything. Reed vows to do whatever it takes to be accepted into their inner circle. Reed uses every part of herself — the good, the bad, the beautiful — to get closer to the Billings Girls. She quickly discovers that inside their secret parties and mountains of attitude, hanging in their designer clothing-packed closets the Billings Girls have skeletons. And they’ll do anything to keep their secrets private.

I liked Private.  It’s been on my to-read list forever, so I finally got around to reading it!

It’s about this girl who goes to boarding school and becomes friends with the popular girls.  There are quite a few cliches, but it was still enjoyable to read. It’s definitely another mean girl-type of story, but it’s one of the better ones, I think.

I’m not sure what secrets Reed is supposed to discover, but since Private is the first book in the series, it’s much more likely that secrets will be revealed in the other books.

There’s definitely an air of mystery and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.  Even though things were pretty predictable, I still wanted to know what happened.  There’s something very addicting about a series like this.

The characters are okay- pretty standard for this kind of story.  Thankfully, I’ve only the first book in the spin-off, and I don’t remember enough to have an opinion about the characters.  I get why Reed just went along with the Billings girls, and it’s interesting to see Arianna from a different perspective.  But I didn’t care too much about her.  I just couldn’t completely connect with her.

It gets a 3 out of 5.  I liked it, and I’ll keep reading, but it didn’t grab me the way I thought it would.