The Elite - Jennifer Banash

Review:

Madison McCoy has just moved from Normal, Illinois, to the Big Apple to live with her grandmother in one of the most expensive apartment buildings in the Upper East Side, The Bramford. Right as she enters and waits for the elevator, she faces three of the most beautiful girls she's seen in her life, Madison, Sophie, and Phoebe, who lead their school and apartment building.

Casey becomes friends with them, and it opens a whole new world of people and places. After getting a makeover from the three, she is meeting all the right people at school. Even Drew, the guy that Madison thinks is all hers.

I couldn't find anything bad about it, except for the few grammar and spelling mistakes I found. My friends will be the first to tell you that grammar is the one thing that annoys me the most; the one thing that I always correct. So, when I find a grammar mistake in a book, it usually turns me off. Oddly, it didn't for The Elite.

I went into it thinking it was going to be like a Gossip Girl type thing, thinking that I wouldn't need to put much thought into it and that fashion names would be dropped on me like crazy. This wasn't the case, however. It was about rich teenagers in New York City, but the book dug deeper into their lives.

It was told in alternating chapters of all the main characters: Casey, Madison, Drew, Sophie, and Phoebe. This helped to understand what each character was thinking and what was going on in their personal lives. You learn that even though they put up a cool front, like nothing could ever go wrong in their lives, that there are things going on in their lives - big things. Madison, Sophie, and Phoebe don't even really tell each other these things that are going on, they just leave it inside.

Also, the fashion name-dropping was not as bad as it is in most books. I knew what almost everything that Jennifer Banash wrote looked like, and there were only a few designers that I couldn't reconize, which is normal for me, because I'm not the biggest on fashion designers.

With a little touch of friendship issues, romance, and drama, Jennifer Banash wrote an excellent book that will leave you anxiously awaiting the second book, In Too Deep, which comes out October 2008.

Mis Citas Favoritas:

"From the top you can see everything... but yourself." - Cover.

"I know - it's like a miniature herd of embroidered moose make their home on the clothes on his back. He should win an award for animal convservation or something." - Page 37

"She was terrified that if all those extra zeros actually registered in her caffine-addled brain, she's sink into a clothing-induced coma like some twenty first century Sleeping Beauty - except that instead of snoozing away peacefully in a glass coffin, she'd be buried under a pile of Ana Molinari kiminos." - Page 85

"Why don't you open that thing up-" Nanna pointed to Casey's closed laptop - "and kill a few hours on YouSpace or MyTube?" - Page 149