Gr 9 Up-During the last six weeks of her senior year, Kate Winthrop finds out she is number 71. She doesn't know what that means until she receives a mysterious instant message that sends her to a Web site, where she finds that it is her ranking (out of 140) in the Millbank Social Stock Market, an underground market allowing insiders to buy and sell investments in Millbank High's female seniors. After freaking out, she tells her friends about the scheme and decides to revamp herself. The girls plan to buy into the market for $500 and then win the $25,000 year-end pool by raising Kate's status from junk bond to blue chip. During her transformation, she almost loses her friends, becomes entangled in a love triangle, and learns that being popular isn't all it's cracked up to be. While Kate has the same thoughts that haunt other teens (and engages in the same underage drinking like many of them) this isn't just another makeover novel. After her revamping, Kate decides that she doesn't want to be in the popular crowd after all. Teens who like Sixteen Candles and Can't Buy Me Love (which Kate watches) will dig this book.-Shannon Seglin, Patrick Henry Library, Vienna, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kate Winthrop, a senior at Millbank High School in New Jersey, accepts her role as a smart but geeky girl with a good heart--but c'mon, a ranking of 71 out of 140 girls in the Millbank Social Stock Market game? Miffed by her below-average status, she transforms herself from toad-ette to princess with help from best buds Dev and Carrie. J.M. Steele, a pseudonym for a pair of New York City entertainment professionals, has created a girl-meets-boy story with a twist. Kate, who reinvents herself as Kat, finds that short skirts and dyed blonde hair launch her skyrocketing market rise. She crosses hottie Will B.'s radar, but could introvert guitar player Jack Clayton be her true match? Addicted to playing the game, Kat is determined to stake her claim to the number-one spot but doesn't realize that she now values flash over friendship. By becoming a shallow "it" girl, Kat risks becoming a player who is played. A lingering wrap-up is the only lag in this otherwise fun and chatty read. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kate is horrified to learn that on a social stock market website she's ranked as a "junk bond." Determined to raise her status, Kate, an otherwise levelheaded girl, reinvents herself and becomes fixated on her "stock." Though it starts as a game, Kate ends up being burned by insider trading in this creative spin on the perils of popularity. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

RULE No. 1: Life is not fair. At least if you live inside a Meg Cabot novel it isn't. And sometimes it's SO not fair, you can't BELIEVE how unfair it is. AT ALL. Meg Cabot, chronic capitalizer and reigning grande dame of teenage chick lit, has too many best-selling series to keep track of - there's the reluctant princess in the "Princess Diaries" books, the reluctant communicator with the dead in "The Mediator," the reluctant national hero in "All-American Girl," and so on (at last count Cabot, at age 41, has 54 books out, a handful of them geared for grown-up girls). As far-ranging as her concepts may be, they all introduce some life-changing event then circle back to the supreme "I want my normal life back" injustice of it all. Cabot's books are quick-paced romps that take one night to read and, apparently, not much longer to write. In addition to regularly updating her blog with detailed posts, she has said in interviews that she writes five to 10 pages a day, turning out roughly a book a month. More unbelievable, though, is that the work holds up. While legions of Meg Cabot imitators get waylaid by brand-name this and "Oh my God" that, Cabot's voice remains fresh. She favors the spill-the-beans-as-you-go style common to teenage fiction, but her material has a spirited fizz that's lacking in many so-called young adult comedies. Makes sense, then, that she's trying her hand at books for younger readers. In the first installment of "Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls," her new middle-grade series for Scholastic Press, Cabot has dialed back her tic of randomly capitalizing every fourth word (she's switched over to italics), the boy-craziness and the out-there premises. The only wild thing happening to 9-year-old Allie Finkle is her parents' decision to move from their perfectly nice new house in the suburbs to a Victorian fixer-upper that "looked very big and creepy sitting there on the street. All the windows - and there were a lot of them - were dark and sort of looked like eyes staring down at us." Worse still, Allie's going to have to leave behind her slightly, annoying best friend, Mary Kay Shiner; her geode collection; and her cozy elementary school. It's up to Allie, an aspiring Veterinarian who's not above burping or smashing the occasional cupcake in a deserving classmate's face, to figure out a way to win the war against moving across town. To keep herself grounded in this ever-befuddling world, Allie has started writing down the rules for everything. Not the rules for science and math, which she gets. But the protocol for life's more elusive bits. "There are no rules, for instance, for friendship. I mean, besides the one about Treat your friends the way you'd want them to treat you, which I've already broken about a million times." Allie's newly learned rules, like "Don't stick a spatula down your best friend's throat" and "Don't put your cat in a suitcase," serve as the book's chapter titles, and the cheerful yellow and salmon book jacket opens up, Adventcalendar style, to reveal lines where readers are encouraged to write their own rules. WITH nothing but these rules serving as the book's gimmick, the story has a looser feel than a typical Cabot novel. The structure suits this age group, mirroring the timewarp experience of childhood itself. One minute Allie is playing dollhouse with a friend ("I suggested that the baby doll get kidnapped and a ransom note, including the baby doll's cut-off ear, get sent to the house by the glass dolphin family") and the next she's fantasizing about what awaits her in the attic of her new house ("The disembodied hand had lived in the attic in that movie I had seen! ... Green, glowing and so scary!"). The tale hums along entertainingly, then takes an unexpected turn when our heroine finds herself on a disastrous play date. Mary Kay Shiner and Brittany Hauser show Allie what their game "lady business executive" entails (hint: it has to do with the "Don't put your cat in a suitcase" rule). Allie handles the situation with aplomb, and her moxie only increases a few scenes later, at the Lung Chung restaurant, where she comes to the aid of an imperiled snapping turtle named Wang Ba. Though its tone is slightly younger than Cabot's books for teenagers, "Moving Day" still brims with vintage Cabot humor and inventiveness. There's the heroine's absurd swirl of know-it-all-ness and cluelessness ("I am older than Mary Kay by a month. Possibly this is why I don't cry as often as she does, because I am more mature. Also, I am more used to hardship, not being an only child") and the droll details that are effortlessly tossed off, like the little brother who dreams of having a bedroom with velvet wallpaper and the boy who gives Mary Kay this charming birthday card: "Too bad Allie's moving, now you'll have no friends at all Happy Birthday!" Cabot is under contract with Scholastic for five more books in the series, though it's unlikely the franchise will stop there. This is an author who can write sequels in her sleep. That's not a rule. More like a law of nature. 'Too bad Allie's moving, now you'll have no friends at all. Happy Birthday!' Lauren Mechling is the author of the novel "Dream Girl," which will be published in July.