About This Book
Reach for this book when your teenager begins showing signs of social anxiety or is radically changing their personality just to fit into a new peer group. It speaks directly to the exhausting effort of maintaining a false persona and the quiet shame that comes from abandoning old friends for 'popular' ones. Through the eyes of Ricki Jo, a farm girl reinventing herself as a city girl, the story explores identity, the pressure of social hierarchies, and the realization that authenticity is more valuable than status. While the setting is a rural Kentucky high school, the emotional themes of peer pressure and self-worth are universal for the 12 to 16 age group. Parents will appreciate the realistic portrayal of how a child's values can be tested by the desire for belonging. It is a gentle but firm reminder that true friends love us for who we are, not who we pretend to be.
