PRETTY GIRL COUNTY

A collaboration between two Black girls who used to be close is threatened by wealth disparities, complicated relationship dynamics, and diverging ideas.

Reya Samuels and Sommer Watkins, who live in Prince George’s County, Maryland, used to be best friends. But that was before Reya’s mother’s reality television career changed their lives and they moved from Seat Pleasant—“where bus stop benches provide seating for the overworked and beds for the unhoused”—to a large brick house in Bowie. Now Reya flaunts her wealth while Sommer has multiple side hustles (including creating digital fashion designs for Black gamers) that will hopefully pay for Spelman College. But when Reya is wait-listed by the Fashion Institute of Technology, she makes Sommer an irresistible offer: She’ll hire her to help put together entries for their school’s annual fashion show that Reya can present in her new portfolio to FIT. The girls connect at their gifted school and Sommer’s dad’s bookstore but otherwise inhabit separate realms, and they must deal with the social class judgments of their friends and family and their own perceptions of self. Readers witness their relationship’s growing pains and remnants of their old closeness bob to the surface in their alternating first-person narratives. Wilson cleverly weaves insights about money’s ability to distort personalities into every relationship in the story. The romance storylines are realistic and sweet but not overly saccharine.

A tale of the power of inner worth told in a distinct and humorous voice.