GOSSIP TIMES THREE

A trio of best buddies, all seventh-grade girls, almost dissolves their friendship when one of the girls goes after another’s crush. Abby, whose two best friends are Bess and Cristy, has been in love with Zack for years. When Bess suddenly becomes Zack’s girlfriend, Abby is too distressed to tell her friend how she feels, but later retaliates, causing a rift between them, and putting Cristy in the uncomfortable middle. It’s rare to fault a book for too much verisimilitude, but this first-person story penned by veteran scribe Koss doesn’t read like it was written in an adolescent voice. Instead, it sounds like an actual teenager, which is to say that it’s jumbled, disjointed, and full of irrelevant digressions and self-conscious asides, penned it. Plusses include a clever punch line and observations about the girls’ divorced mothers, whose various attitudes on men round out the story. (Fiction. 10-14)