Love (In the Cards Series #1) Book

Geek Girl gets Greek God.

That's the latest on Zoe's World, a website that Eberly High's eighth-grade girls check out daily.

Only Anna, Eve, and Syd know that the cards — the mysterious tarot deck Mrs. Rosemont left Anna, along with a psycho cat, Mouli — are responsible. Or, at least, may be responsible...if you believe in that kind of thing.

At first Anna doesn't believe. How can ten little cards foretell the future? But when Declan Kelso, the school's newest hottie, starts looking her way, the future starts looking really good. What, besides fate, could persuade Mr. Cool to join the chorus's gaggle of geeks?

But have the girls read the cards correctly? Or have Anna's hopes and fears led her to misinterpret the cards' true meaning? What happens makes for a funny, suspenseful story, the first in a series of three told by Anna, Eve, and Syd, three very different girls who discover that life is never as neatly laid out as you want it to be.

Publishers Weekly

The first in a planned trilogy that explores clique dynamics for middle-graders, Fredericks's (The True Meaning of Cleavage) twist is a set of tarot cards left to narrator Anna by an elderly woman for whom she catsat, and who recently passed away. Anna, a self-proclaimed "blah nobody," has a crush on geek-turned-hottie Declan. The eighth-grader thinks she's too boring to snag him, but her two best friends, Eve and Syd (each of whom will narrate one of the next two installments), do a tarot card reading that indicates Anna will get the boy. So the two take her shopping to improve Anna's image. The heroine is disappointed to learn (via the Web site "Zoe's World," run by the school gossip) that Declan locked lips with what the friends refer to as "P&P" ("pretty and perfect") Alexa (aka "La Diva") at a Halloween party. But the popular gal is too into P.D.A. for the former geek, so he chooses madeover Anna instead. Anna's ego balloons and she blows off her buddies to spend more time with her now aloof boyfriend. The author aptly captures the jealousy, pettiness and self-consciousness run amok that often accompanies all the worst things about middle school. A subtheme about Oedipus and fate echoes the issues with which Anna grapples. The heroine's intelligent, sympathetic character saves this from falling in line with the more formulaic titles in its genre. Ages 10-14. (Dec.)